‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ might kill major characters, director James Gunn teases

James Gunn has had an incredibly tumultuous few years. Back in 2018, Disney and Marvel Studios fired the director from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after offensive jokes that he made on Twitter resurfaced. Within days, Warner Bros. had approached Gunn about making a movie in the DCEU. Warner offered Gunn a number of projects, but he eventually landed on the Suicide Squad. By March of 2019, Disney had reinstated Gunn as the director of Guardians Vol. 3, but he was already committed to making his Suicide Squad movie. And now that The Suicide Squad is out in theaters, Gunn can finally start talking about his next Marvel movie.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Gunn talked about the differences between making a Suicide Squad movie and Guardians of the Galaxy movie:

Guardians of the Galaxy has a family film element to it, so I’m telling that story to a lot of different people. When Rocket says to Drax, ‘I’m gonna shoot you in the face and kill you,’ we don’t as an audience think in two seconds he’s going to pull out his gun and we’re going to see Drax’s face disappear. In this movie, The Suicide Squad, they say they’re going to shoot each other in the face, and they not only say it, they actually do it. We know that can happen at any time.

Gunn went on to note that “there is a much bigger sense of danger” for the characters in The Suicide Squad. Characters die, often in horribly violent fashion. Meanwhile, although Gunn killed off big Groot in Vol. 1 and Yondu in Vol. 2, he knows that the audience expects most of the characters to survive. “At least in the first two movies,” Gunn adds with a smirk. The interviewer tried to pry further and find out what will happen in Guardians Vol. 3, but Gunn says that we’ll “have to wait and see.”

Who’s dying in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3?

On multiple occasions, Gunn has made it clear that Vol. 3 will be the end of the story he wanted to tell. That’s not to say that he will never make another Marvel movie or that the Guardians will vanish, but he sees this movie as the end of an arc. From his Troma movies to Super to The Suicide Squad, Gunn has never shied away from shocking audiences. It sounds like he’s going to bring some of that energy to the third Guardians movie, which is set to release on May 5th, 2023.

You can watch Entertainment Tonight’s full interview with director James Gunn below: