James Gunn Reveals Which Characters He Wasn’t Allowed To Show In ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’

"Guardians Of The Galaxy" - UK Premiere - Red Carpet Arrivals - James Gunn
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Guardians Of The Galaxy director and former Troma auteur (!) James Gunn hung out for nearly two hours on Adam Green and Joe Lynch’s The Movie Crypt podcast. They discussed which Star Wars spin-off he’d like to direct (none of them, but he does want to watch a Boba Fett spin-off), and he answered numerous Guardians Of The Galaxy queries.

We especially liked his answer regarding which characters he wanted to put in the movie but couldn’t due to legal issues. Here’s his answer, as transcribed by Comic Book:

There’s characters that I’ve been interested in that I’m not allowed to use but I won’t go so far as to say I definitely would have had them. There was a really good chance Bug was going to show up in the first movie but we do not own him… but, anyway, that was going to happen, perhaps. Listen, I really love Rom: Spaceknight, as everyone at Marvel knows because they’ve given me Rom stuff… but we don’t own Rom. I would love for Rom: Spaceknight to show up because I love his story, I love the way he looks, I love everything about him…

There are other characters, but basically, some characters we can work around and we can use. Listen, I wanted to use the Badoon, but the Badoon we don’t own… they’re really interesting. They would be like the cannon fodder guys who were like the Sakaaran in my movie… I wrote them as Badoon but I just did a search-replace-Sakaaran when I found out we didn’t have Badoon. It was strangely late in the process when I found that out. They were designed as Badoon.

For the record, Bug is owned by Takara as part of the Micronauts toy line. Rom: Spaceknight is owned by Parker Brothers, of all people (we hope he banishes Rich Uncle Pennybags to Limbo for cheating in the Beauty Contest). The Badoon were reportedly part of the package when Fox bought up the rights to Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. Coincidentally, using the “search-replace” feature is also how Fox wrote their newest Fantastic Four reboot, search-replacing the words “Mr. Freeze” with “Doctor Doom” in the Batman & Robin script. Allegedly.

Via Blastr

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