Guardians of the Galaxy: Five Things We Want to See

In the coming year, there are quite a few comic book adaptations hitting theaters, but none quite as unpredictable as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.Coming from a director who’s never done anything close to this huge before and focusing on a group of characters that, five years ago, nobody would have believed could get a major motion picture, Guardians is widely regarded as the biggest risk Marvel has taken since they decided to start putting their cinematic universe together a decade ago.It’s the kind of film that could very well become an instant classic–the cast is great, Gunn is well-suited for the material and what little content has made its way out into the world so far has impressed everybody. But with no recognizable superheroes in the film, they’ve got to rely on an aggressive PR campaign, word of mouth and good trailers–more or less like a movie that isn’t an adaptation at all.And movies like that don’t generally do Marvel money.So if being awesome is key to this film’s prospects for success (since they need word of mouth), what would help sell the world on it?

Marvel have a house style–a look and feel that most of their movies fit into. They’ve had a couple of filmmakers go a little outside of the norm, with mixed results. Thor: The Dark World felt more cohesively Marvel than did the first Thor movie, and perhaps as a result has resonated with most audiences more than did Branagh’s film. The third Iron Man film, arguably the most cinematically interesting of the trilogy, seems to have a lot of edges that don’t fit neatly into the jigsaw puzzle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.James Gunn is an interesting director with a great voice that’s all his own; he won’t fit into the generic mold of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They’ll need to have given him some creative freedom to make this film work, and it seems from his remarks that they have. Hopefully, though, they’ll have found a balance where the film doesn’t seem so out of place as a result, especially since it doesn’t inherently fit with the other movies the studio has made so far.