"Rocket [Raccoon] is the heart of this movie. If Rocket doesn't work the movie's not gonna work. If Rocket does work the movie's gonna work. And so for me, the whole time it's been about making something that some people could think of as a cartoon or a ridiculous character into a real creature. If a raccoon really was able to walk and talk and make machines and shoot a gun, how would that really happen? How could that occur? And so for me it's about grounding everything in reality."
The
Guardians Of The Galaxy are made up of some pretty obscure Marvel characters, and there was a worry that with no big name team members, the movie may be a hard sell -- to non comic fans particularly. When those concerns were pot to Gunn he compares what he's doing on
GOTG to the gamble Marvel took on the first
Iron Man movie.
"The truth is when Iron Man came out, basically nobody knew who Iron Man was," he states.
"Iron Man...they sold 15,000 copies of 'Iron Man' a month. That's not enough to even make the first million dollars or whatever. So it really isn't any different...we are starting the wing of Marvel that is the Marvel Cosmic Cinematic Universe. This is Marvel Cosmic. And we're doing exactly what they did with the first Iron Man."