Guardians Of The Galaxy Could Spawn Sequels, So Says Disney CEO
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Guardians of the Galaxy is hands down the strangest Marvel property to be adapted for the big screen since the first Thor movie. Pretty much no one outside of die-hard comics fandom had even heard of the Guardians before Disney and Marvel began their marketing push. Hell, I would have expected Marvel to make a freaking Power Pack movie before they got around to Guardians of the Galaxy. But in spite of all of that, Guardians of the Galaxy has totally won us over, and it looks like it’s going to be a blast. We’re not the only ones who think so; Disney’s CEO thinks Guardians has “franchise potential.”
Yesterday, during a shareholders conference call (the same one that confirmed the Star Wars spin-offs), Disney CEO Bob Iger sounded confident in Guardians’ success. Iger said:
This August 1st, we’re looking forward to introducing the world to more fantastic Marvel storytelling, with a great cast of new characters in Guardians of the Galaxy, which we screened last week and we believe it has strong franchise potential.
Is the mainstream audience ready for gun-wielding space raccoons and walking trees who only ever say, “I am Groot?” It’s definitely encouraging that Marvel has already screened Guardians and, based on Iger’s comments, apparently the reaction was positive. Moreover, calling the movie franchise-ready is definitely a more optimistic appraisal than some of Marvel’s earlier comments, which tended toward the “wait and see” approach when it came to the possibility of more Guardians of the Galaxy movies. But Iger sees Guardians as a chance to open up a whole other section of Marvel mythology for viewers, with tons of space-related stories to pull from decades of comic-book history. And given that Thanos is likely to be the villain for Avengers 3, the cosmic corners of the Marvel Universe are ripe for exploration. Iger continued:
That’s a whole other Marvel realm or universe in terms of where it takes place, the characters that populate it and the stories that you can tell for those characters. So, I think, I’m not going to predict that we’ve got another Avengers on our hands, but that’s certainly the goal.
I would love to see Guardians become a massive hit and spawn sequels. Even from what little we’ve seen of them, I already feel like Peter Quill, Rocket, and the rest are a crew whose adventures I’d love to follow for years to come. Plus, there’s always a shortage of good space-based science fiction films, so if what it takes to fill that gap is a scrappy band of antiheroes, I say bring it on.
And I honestly think Guardians has a chance of being a strong success, something that I never would have predicted a year ago. When the trailer hit earlier this year, it damn near blew up the internet, and I think a big part of that is that director James Gunn seems to have put together a flick that doesn’t remotely take itself seriously. It looks fun and it looks funny, and those are two qualities that should help get mainstream moviegoers on board with this trek into the stranger corners of the Marvel Universe.
So keep your fingers crossed that Guardians of the Galaxy will knock it out of the park this summer. In the meantime, check out two new pictures of Chris Pratt as Peter “Star-Lord” Quill, complete with his badass mask, courtesy of Geek Magazine. Guardians of the Galaxy opens in theaters on August 1.
From Marvel, the studio that brought you the global blockbuster franchises of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers, comes a new team — the Guardians of the Galaxy. An action-packed, epic space adventure, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos, where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain with ambitions that threaten the entire universe. To evade the ever-persistent Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with a quartet of disparate misfits — Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon, Groot, a tree-like humanoid, the deadly and enigmatic Gamora and the revenge-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when Peter discovers the true power of the orb and the menace it poses to the cosmos, he must do his best to rally his ragtag rivals for a last, desperate stand — with the galaxy’s fate in the balance.
