A new review of Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 recounts how its motley crew of superheroes were generally discounted when it was first announced they’d be leading a movie in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. After Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk and other Avenger friends, Marvel was thought to be rolling out its B-team, notes Variety’s Peter Debruge.
Writer-director James Gunn and star Chris Pratt insist it was far worse than that, though.
“I feel like anybody that called us Marvel's B-team was giving us a compliment because I saw [us called] mostly ‘Z Grade heroes,’” Gunn tells us. “[They said], ‘This movie's gonna bomb, no one wants to see these guys.’ That was just all over my [social media] feed after the movie was announced.”
Gunn says Pratt even made a speech on the last day of filming where “he had looked up all these old terrible reviews talking about how we were gonna be Marvel's first bomb, and started reading 'em off about how bad the movie was gonna be and how nobody was gonna see it. And here we are now on the third one in, [and also with] a Christmas special, in two Avengers movies and a Thor movie.”
Indeed, the comedic-leaning Guardians has become a powerhouse franchise for Disney/Marvel. Its first two volumes grossed well over $1.5 billion combined worldwide, and as Gunn mentioned, also led to a Disney+ holiday special, while Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Pratt) and his band of superhero misfits became key components of two Avengers event movies and 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder.
“It really does speak to the nature of outside-in thinking when industry and art meet,” says Pratt, who was rejected for roles in Captain America and Thor and was close to swearing off Marvel movies before he finally landed Guardians. “Folks tend to believe that the reach of a title is the recipe for its success, but it's not. [It’s] the filmmaker, the idea, the creativity, and sometimes being unbridled by previous iterations of a film actually give you freedom to do something original, something different, and then you become the thing that other people are trying to touch…. But it could have been anything. If you give it to James, it's gonna be successful.” (Gunn has had so much success the past decade with both Marvel and DC movies that he was recently named co-chairperson of the latter.)