Guardians of the Galaxy Gets Writers

Marvel announced today via The Hollywood Reporter that writer Chris McCoy, a writer who has never had a feature film produced but whose three scripts--2007's Get Back in 2007, 2009's Good Looking and 2011's Good Kids--have all been tagged with "best unproduced scripts in Hollywood"-type praise, will take over Guardians of the Galaxy, punching up the script from a draft by Nicole Perlman. In the article, Perlman is described as "a graduate of Marvel's now-defunct writing program who wrote two space-themed biopics: Challenger, about the 1986 Space Shuttle disaster, and an untitled Neil Armstrong project." McCoy's work, meanwhile, is identified by its quirky humor, according to THR. The film is, as we know, based on the version of the team most recently seen in Avengers Assemble by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley but popularized by a fan-favorite run by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. The magazine describes its lineup and premise as follows: "Drax the Destroyer, a human resurrected as a green warrior with the sole purpose of killing Thanos (the villain in the Avengers final-scene tease); Groot, a giant tree-man; Star-Lord, a gun-toting half-human/half-alien intergalactic vigilante; Rocket Raccoon, a genetically engineered animal with a knack for guns and explosives; and Gamora, the last survivor of her species who was saved by Thanos to be his assassin but now battles him." Nothing really new there, but given they've been fed information directly from Marvel, the presence of these descriptions might solidify information that comic book fans thought they already knew in "canon" for the upcoming film. Also of note is the fact that McCoy will be rewriting an existing script, meaning that there's already a first draft floating around. If that's the case, and the script only needs a coat of paint rather than a total engine rebuild, so to speak, we might start to see announcements regarding things like directors and casting sooner than later, as the script works its way around the industry in order to keep the film on schedule for its August 2014 release date.