Heh, The GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2 Title is Pretty Neat

There’s a very self-deprecating quality about Guardians of the Galaxy and I love it. It completely embraces the fact that a movie starring a raccoon with a machine gun and a talking tree is f*cking ridiculous rather than trying to treat it as something serious. That’s why the apparent title for the 2017 sequel is so cool.

In an interview with Kevin Feige over at Collider, the Marvel exec let slip a little detail which could completely bring down Marvel as a who- well, it’s not a massive screw-up since a lot of fans guessed it anyway.

“We start shooting Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 in February-March 2016.”

UPDATE: well, that was fast. James Gunn has since confirmed on his Twitter that this is in fact the real title.

Yes, the official title for the @Guardians sequel is GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2. Nice detective work, @colliderfrosty, etc! You got us!

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) June 29, 2015

The original article is as follows, but there isn’t really much point reading now, is there? Bleh. Screw all of you.

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The ‘Vol.2’ title is something which we geeks have been chucking around since before the first movie was even released. It is of course referring to the ‘Awesome Mix Vol. 1’ which plays such a major part in the original film – the mixtape which Peter Quill takes into space with him from his dead mother, forming the soundtrack of the movie. At the end he discovers that she left him another tape – ‘Awesome Mix Vol. 2’. So this is a fun little reference to that.

It’s also interesting how all the other Marvel sequels now adopt subtitles; this would be a return to the style present in the Iron Man movies. Personally I’ve always preferred subtitles, but this is a neat little way of getting around that while referencing the film itself. This is why I think this particular franchise is special. The title wouldn’t necessarily be self-mocking, but rather self-referential and fun. It’s rare you get franchises that would actually do this nowadays, so I’m glad that Guardians does!

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Kevin Feige was either joking or this is just a working title, since he refused to confirm or deny whether he had actually messed up at the end of the interview. Hopefully we’ll find out sooner or later.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2/Volume 2/Vol. 2/Thanos on Ice is out May 5 2017.