By Brent McKnight | 6 years ago

From the get go, Guardians of the Galaxy seemed like Marvel was taking a bit of a chance. After all, the main group of heroes is made up of criminals, murderers, and thugs, and two of the primary characters are a talking raccoon and an anthropomorphic alien tree. But it was a gamble that paid off, and huge, and while the sequel is in the works, that doesn’t mean that writer/director James Gunn is going to sit back and take the easy way out, that’s not his style.

While talking to the Allison Rosen is Your New Best Friend podcast, Gunn discussed his plan for Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and his idea for the story apparently worried some of the folks at Marvel, who called his idea “risky.”

One of the biggest questions left hanging at the end of Guardians is the identity of Peter Quill/Star-Lord’s (Chris Pratt) father. That’s something that is going to figure into the next film in a major way, but if you’re a fan of the comics and think you know what’s going on, you don’t. Gunn says:

It’s different than what’s in the comic books. Peter Quill’s father is somebody different in the comics. So then when the movie came out, we got green-lit on the sequel right away. I went in and I sat down with those guys and I’m like, ‘Okay, here’s what I think the sequel should be.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, whoa. That’s risky, but okay.’ Now I’m going to turn over the story in a few short weeks and we’ll find out how well it works.

That’s kind of clever of Gunn to reveal something without really revealing anything at all. Sure, Peter Quill’s father won’t be Jason of Spartax, aka J’son, as it is in the source material, but he leaves the door wide open for it to be just about anyone in the Marvel Universe.

Again, considering the chance they took on the first film, spending $170 million bringing a relatively unknown title to the big screen, you have to wonder what Gunn came up with that is so out there that the Marvel execs consider it a “risk” at this point. We’ll have to wait and see when Guardians of the Galaxy 2 opens on May 5, 2017, but if the sequel is anywhere near as good as the first, it’ll be totally worth the wait.

In the meantime, I’m really curious to see how Ant-Man performs with audiences. So far, Marvel has been able to turn everything into a hit, but eventually along the line they’re going to make a misstep, and for some reason it feels like that could be Ant-Man. I don’t necessarily think it will be bad, but there’s not the same hype and buzz among viewers as for other titles, and you have to wonder if there will be the same level of connection as with their previous offerings. Then again, they can easily fix that by using Avengers: Age of Ultron as a springboard or by connecting Ant-Man to the rest of the MCU (it’ll likely have a lot to do with the upcoming Civil War storyline).