By Brent McKnight | 6 years ago

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy hasn’t even opened, but that minor detail isn’t going to stop it from already being kind of a big deal. You know you’ve made it when your film gets converted into Lego, and the deep space adventure is already breaking box office records. If you doubt that this will become a worldwide phenomenon, all you need to do is check out star Vin Diesel, who voices the eight-foot-tall alien tree Groot, deliver his character’s only line of dialogue, “I am Groot,” in five different languages.

If you’ve been looking at the massive landslide of Guardians of the Galaxy marketing and thought to yourself, “that looks pretty cool, but what if the action was smaller, blocky, and made entirely of plastic?” Well this is your lucky day, because one of the many, many TV spots Marvel has unleashed on the world has now been translated into Lego, and I have to say, it looks just as awesome in this form as it does in real life. And, after fronting the The Lego Movie, it sounds surprisingly natural to hear Chris Pratt’s voice come out of a small toy man with round yellow head.

And you’re not the only one excited about this movie. Many people scratched their head when the comic book studio announced that Guardians would be their next title. It’s not a book that general audiences are particularly familiar with, and we wondered how it was going to fare at the box office as a result. Even though the movie hasn’t opened yet, the answer to that question is that it will be just fine. Earlier, we reported that the James Gunn-directed Guardians was on track for a $60 million opening weekend (they’ve already approved Guardians of the Galaxy 2), but that’s not all.

According to everyone’s favorite online ticket merchant, Fandango, Guardians of the Galaxy, “is poised to be the biggest August pre-seller in Fandango’s history, far outpacing advance sales for the previous record-holder, Matt Damon’s 2007 The Bourne Ultimatum, and pacing to be this year’s #1 non-sequel pre-seller, beating the previous record-holder, The Lego Movie.”

That’s a hell of a feat for a movie where most people don’t know anything about the characters—the site also reports that 58% of the advanced ticket buyers weren’t previously familiar with Guardians. There’s not even a bona fide star in the mix. Of the five main characters, three of them are moderately well known and liked—Pratt, Zoe Saldana, and ex-professional wrestler Dave Bautista—but none are proven box office draws. Of the two biggest names, Bradley Cooper and Diesel, one is a smart-ass animated raccoon, while the other, like I said before, plays a tree that only says three words.

This doesn’t sound like this should work on paper, but it totally does. If this movie succeeds financially, and by all appearances it will, this is a strong indication can do just about anything they want. People will go see a “Marvel movie,” and their marketing has proven that it can generate interest in even the strangest titles. It doesn’t hurt in this case that they made the most fun, entertaining movie they’ve turned out this far. Read our glowing review HERE.

And Guardians isn’t intended for a purely domestic audience. The movie isn’t confined to one planet, nor can the movie going to be contained by one country, this thing is going global. Just check out Diesel deliver Groot’s signature line in Russian:

In Spanish:

In Portuguese:

In French:

And here’s Jimmy Fallon quizzing Diesel on all the languages he can say, “I am Groot,” including Mandarin, just for the hell of it: