Iconic comic creator Stan Lee would have been toast if Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn had his way, according to a recent episode of podcast The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith.

Lee frequently appears in Marvel movies for just a few seconds on-screen. Gunn has talked about Lee's original cameo before, where the comic guru would appear as yet another prisoner in the Collector's museum. During his chat with Goldsmith, Gunn explained the canned scene further, saying that Lee wouldn't escape from the Collector's clutches.

"We were going to murder Stan Lee."

"He wasn't going to be liberated," Gunn said. "We were going to murder Stan Lee."

When the Collector's museum would have been wiped out by an explosion, as seen in the final film, so too would Stan Lee's little box.

"And I said, ‘Wouldn't it be great if Stan Lee's — these are the kind of ideas that I would come up with and Marvel would say I think that's super James Gunn —but Stan Lee's head is rolling into frame,'" Gunn said. "And anyway, so we didn't do that."

In the final film, Lee kept his head and instead appeared as a suave figure chatting up a local lady. Check it out in the video below.