10 Movie Character Backstories Revealed Years Later
3. Stan Lee Is The Watcher's Informant - Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2
Stan Lee made regular cameos in Marvel movies for more than three decades, as became a significant running joke throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular.
Lee's persistent presence in the MCU as a fleet of wildly diverse characters nevertheless prompted fans to speculate that Lee could in fact be playing a single character assuming a multitude of guises while covertly surveilling Earth.
In particular, fans favoured that he was an extraterrestrial observer from the Marvel comics known as Uatu the Watcher.
Though Lee ultimately didn't end up playing Uatu, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 finally lifted the veil on Lee's role in the MCU, by revealing him to be an informant to the Watchers who mentions his time on Earth as a FedEx delivery man (in reference to his Captain America: Civil War cameo).
While this didn't explicitly detail the reasons for Lee's informant character observing Earth, MCU producer Kevin Feige later confirmed beyond any doubt that the character's backstory was exactly as it was implied:
"Stan Lee clearly exists, you know, above and apart from the reality of all the films. So the notion that he could be sitting there on a cosmic pit stop during the jump gate sequence in Guardians was something very fun – James had that idea and we shot that cameo and loved it so much, you know, you see it a couple of times in the movie.
It wasn't in for a long time and we put it back in towards the end of the process where he references that time he was a Federal Express agent – we thought it would be fun to put that in there because that really says, so wait a minute, he's this same character who's popped up in all these films.
This is an especially fun backstory reveal because it re-contextualises every single MCU movie in a slight but entertaining way.