Guardians of the Galaxy 3: James Gunn Shares First Look at Stack of Storyboards

James Gunn is one of the busiest filmmakers in superhero cinema. The director is putting the final touches on HBO Max’s Peacemaker at the same time he’s starting pre-production on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. In fact, the helmer took to his Twitter account Sunday afternoon to share off a stack of the storyboard drawings he’s done for the highly anticipated Guardians threequel. While no actual frames or characters are visible in the image, Gunn’s storyboard stack is massive and, as the filmmaker himself puts it, covers but a fraction of the entire movie.

“Stack of hand drawn storyboards I just finished from the past few days for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” Gunn tweeted. “This represents 12 pages of script & will be the foundation for this section of the film. Designing the film like this is the most important part of my job at this point.”

Gunn revealed in June that he had already started storyboarding the film, drawing a static frame for each shot included within the overall movie.

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In a thread following his initial picture, Gunn explained exactly why he does it. In short, the filmmaker says it helps out the synergy between all departments on the film from stunts to production design and costuming.

“This book of drawings & descriptors becomes my film Bible, which is more important to me than the script,” the director added. “For me writing a script is often just me trying to describe what I see visually, so this is closer to the truth of how I see the story (the film itself is even closer).”

He concluded, “Every shot in my movies is hand drawn first. That’s at least 2,500 shots or so per my recent films. Many of the shows – about 1/3 – take anywhere from 2 to 10 cards or more – because I’m drawing the movement. So I probably end up with about 3,000 cards.”

The first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies are now streaming on Disney+ while Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is due to hit theaters May 5, 2023. I Am Groot and the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special have yet to receive release dates. Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.

What members of the Guardians would you like to see spin-off shows of? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!