If you ask Star-Lord, he’ll tell you that Footloose is the greatest movie in history. In fact, he somewhat often compares his own real life scenarios to those of Footloose star Kevin Bacon across a pair of Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Bacon, who has his new thriller You Should Have Left opening in an on demand format this Friday, had no idea that James Gunn had worked his name into the script of the popular Marvel movie. In fact, it was a genuine surprise when he was seated in a theater watching 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy for the first time.
Bacon connected with ComicBook.com in promotion of You Should Have Left, which is where he opened up about also being famous in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Well, I mean, there was the mention in Guardians which I thought was pretty amazing,” the actor said. “I didn’t really know anything about it and then I went and sat in the movie theater and somebody just said to me, ‘Have you seen that movie yet?’ I said, ‘No, I’m going but I haven’t seen it yet.’ I’m sitting in the movie theater and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s some shout out!’”
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In 2014, when Guardians of the Galaxy hit theaters, Bacon shared his review of the film on Twitter for director James Gunn.
Hey @JamesGunn Just out of #GuardiansOfTheGalaxy it’s nothing short of #Super IMHO
— Kevin Bacon (@kevinbacon) August 2, 2014
“It’s cool,” he says of the references in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Infinity War. “It was cool.”
It’s probably not a coincidence that Gunn had Bacon on his mind while making Guardians of the Galaxy. In addition to working in plenty of elements of 80s pop culture seeing as that was when Star-Lord left earth providing the opportunity to invoke the Footloose references, Gunn had already made Super with Kevin Bacon.
“I did a movie with James Gunn. It was a movie that he did before he started that series. It was a tiny, tiny little movie and we were in Shreveport, Louisiana,” Bacon recalls. “A movie with Rainn Wilson. “It was a part that apparently he had originally had Jean-Claude Van Damme. Jean-Claude fell out for some reason. James called me and I had been a fan of this movie Slither than he had made. He said, ‘Hey, you wanna come do this part?’ I said, ‘Take Jean Claude Van Damme’s sloppy seconds? Definitely.’”
As the story goes, Super became a film with a cult following who raves about it still today, and Bacon went on to be famous in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Star-Lord and the rest of Kevin Bacon’s fans can look forward to seeing him in action again with You Should Have Left, as the Blumhouse thriller starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried is available on demand on June 19.
