Now, you read this article’s title and said, “Of course they wouldn’t! Writer-director James Gunn is a visionary!”

But let’s be honest–one of the most common complaints about Marvel Studios’ films is that the filmmakers don’t always have as much say as they should. A talented auteur like Edgar Wright can easily be swapped out so a Peyton Reed can take over and produce an Ant-Man flick that still manages to entertain, despite whatever behind-the-scenes drama went down.

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So maybe you wonder, just how much of an influence did Gunn really have over the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. As it turns out, quite a lot!

During a September 9 panel at Hasbro’s HASCON event in Providence, Rhode Island, Jesse Falcon, Marvel Entertainment’s director of merchandising, asked what state the first Guardians film was in before Gunn joined the project.

Whatever state it was truly in, it sounds like it wouldn’t have been the crowd-pleaser it’s become.

“There was a previous draft that was there when I came in, and then there were a couple of rewrites, a couple of drafts by different writers after that,” Gunn told Falcon at the panel. “But it didn’t have the stuff that people think of as the basic Guardians things. It didn’t have the Walkman or the music. There was no comedy in it or humor. Rocket–he wasn’t the sad little Frankenstein character he is in the movies. So that stuff all came later, after I came in.” Thank God for Gunn, huh? I mean, how would you get through the workday without Awesome Mix Vol. 1 and 2?

If anything, this is just a testament to how important it is for Marvel Studios and other major studios to recognize the impact talented filmmakers can have on these franchises. Based on everything I’ve seen of Thor: Ragnarok, they may have gotten the message!