Out of all Marvel characters why was Starlord changed the most to match the MCU?

[Michael Watkins]

Chris has limited range.

[MajorHoy]

Wait, did they change Starlord's racial background?

[JKtheMac]

Wait, did they change Starlord's racial background?

Are you a secret Hoff fan? You chose the perfect juxtaposition to suggest he was the better Fury. He looks the part there.

[Lee Stone]

Most often things are changed because they simply just worked for a larger audience.

You can't really blame the comics for bringing that influence over.
If anyone is really responsible, it's the movie producers, directors and writers, for not staying faithful to the original material.
It's their work that gets seen by more people and will have a lasting impression on what defines a character.

[Frontier]

Would anyone say comic Quill is more popular and well-liked after being rebooted to be more like the MCU version?

Or would that just be a result of people projecting Chris Pratt's Quill from the movies onto his comic version?

Because he certainly was not popular enough to carry his own book.

[Lee Stone]

Would anyone say comic Quill is more popular and well-liked after being rebooted to be more like the MCU version?

Or would that just be a result of people projecting Chris Pratt's Quill from the movies onto his comic version?

Because he certainly was not popular enough to carry his own book.

There's likely millions of people that saw Guardians and liked Starlord in it but don't read comics.
It's just something they're not accustomed to doing.

I remember a book with him more like the Pratt version, but wasn't he stuck on Earth or something?
Not exactly the setting I'd want to read with him.
I'd expect Han Solo type adventures, away from the Guardians, in a Star Lord comic. Maybe even looking and acting like Pratt's Star Lord.
Not another Hawkeye styled comic, with him acting out a CW tween drama, which is what I got the vibe of from the preview art for that series.

[MajorHoy]

Are you a secret Hoff fan? You chose the perfect juxtaposition to suggest he was the better Fury. He looks the part there.

It was just a convenient image I found on a Google image search.

All I really cared about were original comic book-Nick and Samuel L. Jackson-Nick.

[Holt]

Because companies, for good or ill, generally like some semblance of synergy. Way more people watched the Guardians of the Galaxy movie than had ever bought a comic book starring Star-Lord, so it probably made sense from a corporate perspective to make him more like his movie incarnation.

I see why they did it, but I'm glad Cates is doing his own thing.

[Inversed]

What I always thought the most interesting thing regarding Star-Lord's change is if you go back and read Bendis' Guardians run, the first year or so of the book (before the film came out), Peter much more closely resembled his original persona, with his classic costume in tow and more focus on his more serious "Space Cop" persona, but he was still a bit more quippy and goofy than he was back then. However once the film came out, and he got his own solo series, that's when he not only got a change into his more movie accurate costume, but started to become much more comedic and the emphasis on much of a screw up he is. So despite it not being a complete change in personality and there was some attempt to have some semblance of a transition, the changes still felt fairly obvious.

I also think the main reason that some people may not like the change beyond it being different, is because they may just be tired of non-stop screwup characters in general. I will agree that I do think the goofy personality for Star-Lord is much more interesting than the straight faced serious space cop of old Star-Lord, I just think there needs to be a balance in how he is portrayed, by not making him completely incompetent, and giving him room to succeed in some way.

[Jabare]

barely anyone knew who he was so it was a fresh canvas to play with. This is what happens when you work with James Gunn

[Frontier]

I also think the main reason that some people may not like the change beyond it being different, is because they may just be tired of non-stop screwup characters in general. I will agree that I do think the goofy personality for Star-Lord is much more interesting than the straight faced serious space cop of old Star-Lord, I just think there needs to be a balance in how he is portrayed, by not making him completely incompetent, and giving him room to succeed in some way.

Personally, for me, I think the old Star-Lord worked really well in the setting he was in (DnA) and I just can't really buy into the transition between that guy and the guy who we have now even if there are some times when the writers seem to remember who Star-Lord used to be.

DnA Star-Lord was a little flippant but in more of a rugged war veteran kind of way. I remember him mocking a lot of people circa Annihilation.

[Armageddon]

The posts above have made valid points, and while I may agree with them it’s still a shame what has happened to comic Star-Lord. The Dan Abnett run of Guardians of the Galaxy made Star Lord one of my favorite comic characters but most of his comic appearances after the movie came out are completely unreadable. Thankfully Cates is taking a different approach with the character in the current comic run.

Thanks for telling me about Cates run. It’s really great.

[CrimsonEchidna]

I will give the answer nobody likes because the character is better in the MCU. It is nature of fiction when you get a chance to retell a story you get change aspect that were bad or change things to work better. Comics fans have a hard time accepting it but the movie version are sometime better than comic version. Characters like Starlord, Thanos, Killmonger, M'Baku, Shuri,Vulture,etc I would argue are better than there comic book counterparts. I would argue that Fox making Wolverine handsome and taller are improvement and lessening the length of his hair every movie was improvement. Miles in into the Spiderverse is probably the best version the character. Aquaman in current movie works better than probably any incarnation. You can improve on fiction.

That leads to interesting decision making process do you try to implement the improvements or do you stick with the version of character who has been pretty good. Sometimes you get a middle solution like Iron Man who is clearly now influenced by RDJ performance but still enough of the comic book version to keep everyone happy. Sometimes you fully change them like Shuri or Starlord knowing that when a writer captures movie version on the comic page it will be special.

I'll admit, that was the answer I was kind of dancing around lol

[Frontier]

I will give the answer nobody likes because the character is better in the MCU. It is nature of fiction when you get a chance to retell a story you get change aspect that were bad or change things to work better. Comics fans have a hard time accepting it but the movie version are sometime better than comic version. Characters like Starlord, Thanos, Killmonger, M'Baku, Shuri,Vulture,etc I would argue are better than there comic book counterparts. I would argue that Fox making Wolverine handsome and taller are improvement and lessening the length of his hair every movie was improvement. Miles in into the Spiderverse is probably the best version the character. Aquaman in current movie works better than probably any incarnation. You can improve on fiction.

That leads to interesting decision making process do you try to implement the improvements or do you stick with the version of character who has been pretty good. Sometimes you get a middle solution like Iron Man who is clearly now influenced by RDJ performance but still enough of the comic book version to keep everyone happy. Sometimes you fully change them like Shuri or Starlord knowing that when a writer captures movie version on the comic page it will be special.

I mean, "more interesting" can be in the eye of the beholder because there are so many different contexts and histories between characters in the comics and the movies.

Sometimes characters benefit from losing a lot of their comic baggage even when the essence of the character is still captured while other times the baggage is too much a part of them in the comics to wholesale change them or convincingly make them like their movie counterparts.

And that's not even getting into how there are sometimes popular portrayals that have nothing to do with the movies and works against the movies. I don't think Chris Hemsworth's Thor in Ragnarok makes the classic Thor portrayed by Rick Wasserman in Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes a less then worthy portrayal of the character. There have been very different portrayals of Aquaman from Momoa and may continue to be.

I don't think I can think of a writer who's really been able to capture the "movie magic" and bring it into the comic, even if they've tried numerous times.

Indeed Star Lord is almost the poster child for this. If any one of his previous incarnations had actually taken off then maybe they would have used that in the movie. Instead he has a long history of tweaking and change because he was never quite finished. His original story was fine, but not if you want to integrate him into the MCU or even the MU. Even that original story developed as it went along. I doesn’t read as a unified story, it reads as a story that slowly expanded and changed.

I can see where he went from the old school Star-Lord to the DnA Star-Lord fairly convincingly, less so then I can DnA Star-Lord to current Star-Lord.

(But that's just me).

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Jim Shooter said something interesting on this front:

"I just saw the Wonder Woman movie-–it was good, I liked it. And I heard people say, ‘Well. it’s not the original Wonder Woman.’ Here’s the deal. If you go out and ask 1,000 people to tell you everything they know about Superman, you’ll hear the same things — Daily Planet, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, blah blah. You’ll never hear about Mister Mxyzptlk or even the Fortress of Solitude. Anything the 1,000 people say—keep that, don’t mess with that. Anything that 1,000 don’t say, you get a little flexibility. Wonder Woman was created during the war, so she has the red, white and blue with stars, you know? No one cares about that. When you ask people about Wonder Woman, you’re lucky if they come up with Amazons. So they made some graceful changes and it was fine. It doesn’t have to be a red white and blue suit. So to me, people are just [cavalier] about ignoring the intentions of the original creators-–ignoring the equity that was built up over the years. It’s, ‘I’m in charge now so I’ll do anything I damn well please,’ and that’s almost always a mistake. When Walt [Simonson] did Thor, he didn’t reboot it or throw away the past. He just made it good."
— Jim Shooter

Guardians of the Galaxy were totally forgotten until the movie. But to the extent people knew them, they knew Gamora was involved, as was Rocket Raccoon and Groot. So that wasn't changed, but everything else was altered. And those reinterpretations and changes made by the movie ultimately worked.