It’s a good time to be James Gunn right now. The director has had a massive year, thanks to Guardians Of The Galaxy raking in vast swathes of cash at the box office. With a sequel on the way and every kid getting out of trouble by saying “I Am Groot”, Guardians Of The Galaxy is pretty much the new Star Wars. And much like those iconic cosmic movies, there are sequels in the works.
Though the script still needs to get over that hurdle of actually being written, Gunn is confident in what he wants to see and omit from the sequel, according to a recent Q&A with SlashFilm:
Who knows how much we’ve influenced Phase Three but one thing is the Guardians aren’t back seat to The Avengers. Captain America, Thor, those other movies, they do really support The Avengers and I think take a back seat to The Avengers. The Guardians are their own thing. The cosmic side of the universe is its own thing. And because the movie was so successful, it was more successful than Iron Man was, that changed the way other people looked at it but I still look at it the same way.
Which will lead to Gunn focusing on getting to know the characters better, instead of slapping a new Awesome Mix into the tape deck of the Milano:
I think the main thing with moving on is we can’t just repeat ourselves. We can’t just say “Okay, well let’s start with something sad and shift into something really happy with some music and let’s have the Awesome Mix work in exactly the same way only with songs from the 80s instead of the 70s.” All of those things, that doesn’t interest me. For me the shift is really about getting to know the characters on a deeper level, knowing them more intimately and uncovering facets of those characters that make them more real to us. At the center of what works about Guardians is that people like the characters.
Which of course means more history lessons, as characters find their back stories expanded on:
Yes. I mean more deeply into the characters themselves and who they are, how they work and how they think. What their flaws are, what their strengths are. They’re a much more flawed group than The Avengers. They have major major issues.
And while Gunn is focused on the sequel, he may not be planning a Guardians Of The Galxy 3 as initial reports suggested:
There was a big rash of “James Gunn Was Thinking Of Ideas For Guardians of the Galaxy 3.” I don’t think I really said that. What I said was “I had ideas for Guardians of the Galaxy 2. I knew what I was going to do for that, and I had ideas for beyond that.” That doesn’t necessarily mean Guardians of the Galaxy 3 because there are a lot of different characters in this movie that could go in a lot of different directions. And some of the characters I’m most interested in aren’t necessarily Guardians of the Galaxy.
Look, I’d pay all kinds of money for a Yondu spin-off. Until then, I’m waiting until May 5 2017 for Guardians Of The Galaxy 2.
Last Updated: November 17, 2014
