By Brent McKnight | 6 years ago

Now that Guardians of the Galaxy has hit huge at the box office—the record-breaking weekend haul is more than $94 million domestically and north of $160 million world wide—the future of Marvel’s latest franchise looks bright. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 already has the green light and a July 28, 2017 release date on the schedule, but there’s even more in the works. The comic book giant already has plans in place for a crossover between the Guardians crew and The Avengers.

Pumping up the film, members of the cast and crew sat down for an interview with Yahoo U.K. When the subject of a potential tag team partnership came up, they confirmed that there have been continuing discussions, and that there is already a potential storyline in place. Though this sounds like it is going to go down, James Gunn, writer/director both Guardians and Guardians 2, teased that it’s possible that there might be some members missing from both sides.

Gunn says:

We talked about all sorts of possibilities [for a crossover] and I kind of know what the basic plan is. That could or could not include a couple of Avengers and a couple of Guardians meeting up, or all of the Avengers and all of the Guardians. But, we do inhabit the same universe and they’re pretty big personalities that are likely to, at some point or another, run into each other.

Vin Diesel, who lends his voice to the eight-foot-tall alien tree Groot, who only says the words, “I am Groot,” is on board with whatever they throw at them. He says:

I think there’s going to be huge fans of the Guardians and there are huge fans of the Avengers and I think the discussion has already been had. I think the audience may demand something like that.

Chris Pratt has a somewhat dissenting opinion, though he appears to have total faith in Marvel and what they plan to do in the future. He says:

If you go from five characters and you add another five characters, that’s ten characters. That can be very difficult. That being said, Marvel knows their stuff. Knows there business. And I see this, rather than taking the worlds that already exist and putting them together, this opens up doors into brand new worlds. We take characters we didn’t even know existed in the four corners of the universe and we see their stories.

Pratt’s is my favorite answer. As much as I do sincerely enjoy the various Marvel movies, Guardians is a breath of fresh air. It has a unique tone and feel from the previous members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and feels like its own thing, not necessarily a piece building towards something bigger. I would love nothing more than to see more adventures from these characters, to watch this group tool around deep space getting into sticky situations. I don’t necessarily need or want them to show up in other places. Can’t they just have their own thing?

In reality, Pratt’s words aren’t so out of step with what Gunn mentions. Even broken up in to groups of five as they are, some characters get a bit shorted—for instance Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) in Guardians, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) in Avengers—so trying to fit all ten big personalities into one film might be a bit much. In that scenario, someone is getting screwed. Marvel is well aware of this, and though the impulse is to fit everyone into every movie, they’ll most likely rein it in.

The real question is, when and where does this happen? Do the two franchises come together in Guardians of the Galaxy 2? Will something in the wake of the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron launch a few of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes into the far reaches of the galaxy? Are they really even separate franchises at this point? All of the films are so interconnected at this point, with characters popping up in various installments fronted by other characters, that the MCU is essentially just one big family of films.

Check out the entire interview here: