Talking raccoon + green humanoid + sentient tree-man = box office uncertainty.
“The superhero genre is dead!” they cry. They’ve been preaching this Armageddon since the first X-Men movie came out and restarted the superhero fad, and these naysayers were positive they had found their first plague with Scott Pilgrim’s commercial flop. Yet, amidst all the insane chanting and highbrow swearing, the superhero genre has been thriving, and no year passes without someone in spandex or leather headlining the summer blockbuster season.
But summer audiences are fickle, jumping between blockbusters like neurotic kids with ADHD (remember those muscle- bound heroes of the 80s? The ones with zero acting skills? Me neither). We may be reaching a saturation point; a new craze may be just around the corner (I vote for a return of the talking pets genre). Any upcoming comic book movies will either define superheroes as an actual cinema genre – to go alongside film noir, or the Western – or prove that it was always just a passing fad. And few movies will test the audience’s tolerance to costumed heroics more than Guardians of the Galaxy.
Based on the critically acclaimed (read: commercially “meh”) series by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, the Guardians are something of a cross between the team of misfits style of the X-Men and the scope and heroics of the Avengers. But, you know, in space, and without any of the brand recognition. Then with the space opera setting, plus a gun-toting raccoon and a semi-coherent talking tree among the Guardians’ core members, this oddball concept will introduce a new level of comic book weirdness to the mainstream movie-going audience. That’s while demanding enough suspension of disbelief to accept that all this takes place in the same ‘reality’-grounded Marvel universe of Iron Man and Captain America.
Image: Marvel Studios
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