Guardians of the Galaxy is part of what’s considered Phase Two of Marvel’s superhero movies. The second phase kicks off with Iron Man 3, then we’ve got Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thor: The Dark World, Guardians, Avengers 2, and Edgar Wright’s Ant Man. Phase Three is rumored to include Doctor Strange.
Guardians is slated to be helmed by James Gunn, who wrote the 2004 Dawn of the Dead, and now Michael Rooker, one of the best characters actors we have, is onboard to play Yondu. Rooker is one of those actors where you may not immediately know the name, but you know the face from The Walking Dead, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Cliffhanger, Criminal Minds, and more. Rooker has also done video game acting work for The Chronicles of Riddick, Scarface: The World Is Yours, Lollipop Chainsaw, and Call of Duty Black Ops 2.
With the success of the Avengers, the major studios are trying to put together similar superhero teams. Warner Brothers is still trying to get Justice League off the ground, and Guillermo Del Toro is also trying to get his dark version of The Avengers together which will include Swamp Thing and Constantine.
If you’re not familiar with Guardians, as Vulture reminds us, Rooker plays the character who is “an expert hunter and tribesman of the first planet outside of Earth’s solar system colonized by humans.” Yondo also is the one who puts the Guardians, and Vulture also noticed a Walking Dead similarity: Yondo had to work without a right hand, just like Merle, the character Rooker plays on Dead.
So far, according to imdb.com, the cast includes Rooker, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Chris Pratt as Peter Quill / Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer, and Damion Poitier rumored as Thanos. But the real question is who is going to voice Rocket Raccoon? If you’re not familiar with Guardians, there is a talking raccoon who is part of the team, and this won’t be easy to pull off on the big screen. (Jim Carrey was rumored to voice Rocky, but that story was quickly shot down.)
Gunn promised Vulture, “I’ve done a lot of studying with real raccoons, and we had real raccoons come in. We’ve done photography with them, I’ve played with raccoons and fed raccoons, and dealt a lot with real raccoons to get some of the behavior down…It’s really, really important to me that Rocket Raccoon, who is the hear of the movie, is not a cartoon character. It’s not Bugs Bunny in the middle of The Avengers – it’s a real, little, somewhat mangled beast that’s alone.”