Author: Charles Murphy

And now his watch is ended. James Gunn‘s MCU tenure comes to a close when Marvel Studios latest release, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, opens this week across the globe. And as Gunn moves on from the MCU, a pair of the Guardian franchise’s key players, Dave Bautista and Zoe Saldaña, have both indicated that the threequel will mark their final appearances as their respective characters. While the team has expanded over time, Drax and Gamora were part of the original group of a-holes that took the world by storm in 2014 and will be tough to replace but would anyone be tougher to replace than Chris Pratt‘s Star-Lord?

Though he’d been in the comics since 1975, most folks had no idea who Star-Lord was until Pratt brought him to life as a music-loving moron in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The character grew so popular that he became a key player in both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame and while his story arc is taking a bit of a backseat to Rocket’s in Vol. 3, Peter Quill is still one of the MCU’s heaviest hitters. Is there more in the tank for Star-Lord after Vol. 3?

It sure sounds like it, according to Pratt. In an interview with GamesRadar+, the star made it clear that while it might not be the same without Gunn, he’s up for reprising the role…but only under the right circumstances.

It would be strange to continue Peter’s story without James. He’s done such a masterful job in the first three films. We really found the voice of Peter Quill together and without him, obviously, I would never have had this opportunity. He writes it, he directs it, he dreams up the music, it’s his imagination on screen. So, to continue to tell the story, it would really be important to honor what he’s done in the first three films and to honor what the fans have grown to love about the character and not simply do it because people might show up to pay for it, you know?

Chris Pratt

All that being said, it’s no guarantee that we’ll see Pratt back in the role. “I don’t want to be cynical in the approach and if that’s the case, I just wouldn’t do it at all,” explained Pratt. “So maybe down the road if something makes sense I would do it but it would really have to check a lot of the right boxes,” he concluded.

Pratt certainly has no problem finding work in Hollywood but he’s also become one of the faces of the MCU. While Marvel Studios has never been much for one-to-one adaptation of comic books or comic book events, the truth is that many of Star-Lord’s greatest adventures from the pages of Marvel Comics have yet to be told in the MCU. So, depending on what plans Kevin Feige and the Parliament have in store for the Cosmic corner of the franchise, there could be plenty of action ahead for Pratt should he chose to continue in the role.

Source: GamesRadar+

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 marks the end of a passion project that has occupied a decade and change of director James Gunn‘s career. Marvel Studios brought Gunn on board in 2012 and tasked him with making a tentpole film around a group of comic book characters most people had never heard of that included a talking raccoon and a tree. What followed was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon as Guardians of the Galaxy took the world by storm in 2014. The characters quickly worked their way into the hearts of the audience and through subsequent appearances in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, went from unknowns to major players in the MCU’s Infinity Saga.

And while the Infinity Saga marked the end for many of Marvel Studios major heroes, the Guardians kept on keeping on into the Multiverse Saga where they’ve seen action in Thor: Love and Thunder and their own Holiday Special ahead of their latest adventure set to be told in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. With Gunn moving on to shepherd the new era of DC Comics projects at Warner Bros. Discovery, his time with the team has come to an end, even if some or all of them may find their way into new stories. During the global press junket for the film, host Nathan Fillion asked Gunn if he’d miss the characters he’s created as his time working with Marvel Studios comes to an end.

“I’m gonna miss the characters,” said Gunn. “That’s the saddest part for me, is I really, truly love these characters. I love all of them. I think there’s certain ones that I have a special fondness for, especially Rocket.” Gun continued, “And yeah, the saddest part of all of this. I’m gonna see all these people again. They’re all friends of mine. But I’m not gonna see the characters. I’m not gonna be writing the characters again, at least not in the near future. And so, that’s a real sadness, yeah.“

Interestingly enough, Gunn left the door slightly open for his return to the MCU at some point down the road; however, given how busy he is with Superman: Legacy and the rest of the all-new, all-different DCU, it’s hard to imagine him carving out time to return to the Guardians no matter how much he loves them.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens across America on May 5th.

As fans steel themselves for an emotional farewell to one of Marvel Studios’ most beloved cast of characters, the mastermind of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise reveals he once deviously plotted to undermine the grieving process. James Gunn has made no bones about the fact that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is Rocket’s story, so much so that he once considered telling it without most of the rest of the team!

And I thought about, ‘Well, okay, if there was a talking space raccoon, how would he have come to exist?’ And as I mused upon it, I started thinking about how this was the saddest creature in the universe, and that was actually the seed to me for the entire Guardians trilogy. That was my way into it, this underpinning of just isolation and sadness, and all of these characters are isolated and sad. So I knew what Rocket’s backstory was from that moment before I had come up with the rest of that stuff for Vol. 1. It was the first thing I came up with.

James Gunn on how Rocket became the center of Guardians of the Galaxy
-io9

In an interview with io9, Gunn revealed that while he’d cracked Rocket’s backstory years ago, he wanted it to be at the center of the emotional conclusion to his time with the franchise; however, there was a time when he wasn’t sure the story needed to include the entire team. “I always thought it was a third movie thing because I thought we had to tell Peter Quill’s story first and then get into Rocket’s story,” explained the director. “I think the only question was, was it going to be a Rocket and Groot movie or was it going to be Guardians 2—because initially, I was going to do it as Rocket and Groot.“

Rumblings of a Rocket and Groot project have been around since the Guardians made their MCU debut. In fact, Gunn confirmed that prior to the 2014 release of Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel Studios had considered making as series of shorts to introduce the core team of Guardians and one of those would have featured Rocket and Groot. “I forgot about this, but this is true,” said Gunn referring to the scrapped projects in a Tweet from October of 2021. “Not only did we plan it,” Gunn continued, “we shot footage for one of the scripts (Rocket & Groot) – part of which was the first shot of Rocket shooting a machine gun on Groot’s back that we showed at San Diego Comic Con.”

 We toyed with the idea of doing short films on Drax, on Rocket and Groot, and on Gamora, leading up to Guardians. This One-Shot series would have led into the Guardians movie proper — which would have also been directly preceded by a fourth self-contained short film about a mysterious kid who loved fantasy things. Then you’d start Guardians. And half-way through, we would reveal that big space hero is the kid from the short. We thought that would be clever, but it was too much.

Kevin Feige on the scrapped Guardians of the Galaxy prequel One-Shots

Rocket’s special connection with Groot certainly helped fans fall in love with not only the offbeat duo but the rest of the team almost a decade ago, so Gunn’s instinct to focus on them while exploring Rocket’s origins is understandable. However, once it became clear that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was set to be Gunn’s MCU sendoff, you can bet he wanted to make sure each of the characters he’d created and curated over the years had a proper sendoff.

Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens in theaters on May 5th!

Sources: io9, Inside the Magic

As Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens across the globe this week, fans are sure to exit their showing feeling a mix of emotions. Early reviews of the movie have indicated that the capstone of James Gunn‘s trilogy works as a heartbreaking sendoff to a group of a-holes that have gone from unknown to some of Marvel Studios most beloved heroes. While it’s clear that the journeys of some of these heroes will continue in the MCU, Gunn–and more than one of the film’s talented actors–have made it clear that Vol. 3 is the end of the road for them adding to the emotions of the film.

Marvel Studios has completed several trilogies before including, most recently, the Ant-Man trilogy; however, none of them have seemed to pack the emotional punch that Vol. 3 seems prepared to unleash. During the global press event for the film, host Nathan Fillion asked Marvel Studios One Above All, Kevin Feige, if he could put his finger on why this one feels so much different. “You know, we’ve had trilogies before. We’ve had a number of them, actually,” said Feige. “And I was thinking, why does this feel so different and so much of a passage of some sort? And it’s because Guardians really was the first movie that was completely outside of the realm. It tied in with Thanos and Infinity Stones. But The Avengers were not in it. And we weren’t setting up Tony Stark’s next adventure, or Captain America. And it was really our attempt of saying, we don’t wanna just do superhero movies.“

Longtime fans of the MCU likely recall the trepidation that swirled after Guardians of the Galaxy was first announced. Given that most fans had never heard of the characters, it was widely presumed that the film would flop. While it was certainly a gamble for the studio, as Feige explained, for the MCU to grow, it had to be more than the core Avengers and the Guardians opened that door. “We don’t want to just do Iron Man movies or Avengers movies. And we wanted to do, as James said earlier, a big space movie,” Feige explained, “and it worked in a crazy way. It worked entirely because of James Gunn. So, it just feels like this trilogy, and James writing and directing all three of them, it represents something unique within the pantheon of the MCU, that I’m very proud of.”

In hindsight, Gunn‘s Guardians captured lightning in a bottle. Like the team itself, the odds were stacked against the first film launching as successfully as it did and with the enormously high expectations that every Marvel Studios project has hanging over it now, it seems unlikely we’ll ever see a feelgood story like the Guardians again.