Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 has officially been put “on hold”, and there’s a chance the series might never take off again.
With the project stop-starting every few weeks at the moment, journalist Erick Weber asked Marvel boss Kevin Feige what was going on at a Black Panther event in Los Angeles this week.
Tweeting Feige’s answers to three questions, only one of which we care about (well of course we’re getting an Avengers trailer before the end of the year, and of course Namor could make an appearance at some time…), Weber confirmed that Guardians 3 is back “on hold” again.
If you’ve missed the last few months of Marvel news, here’s the short version: Guardians 3 was all set to begin to filming when a string of inappropriate tweets from director James Gunn was dug up by some slightly dubious individuals with a political agenda. Gunn was fired, and everything went into meltdown.
The cast all pleaded with Disney to rehire Gunn, Dave Bautista threatened to break his contract, and the film was temporarily stalled. When Disney decided not to rehire Gunn, he quickly skipped over to DC and Guardians 3 looked less likely to ever actually happen. Most recently, Disney moved the release date from 2020 to 2021, and it briefly seemed like they had some kind of plan for making the sequel work. But now, of course, we’re back to square one again with the news that it’s “on hold”.
Clearly, the production is going to have to come “off hold” very, very soon if there’s any hope of it meeting that new 2021 release date. With no director on board – and very few probably willing to take on a cast that doesn’t want them there – and everyone else involved only doing it out of contractual obligation (or not at all, in Bautista’s case), making a Gunn-less Guardians is obviously proving a bit tricky.
If the film does miss its new date, and if the cast continue to support Gunn and make it known that they’re not happy with anyone replacing him, it seems likely that Disney will cancel Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 all together.
We’ll see the crew of The Milano again in Avengers 4, but it’s looking more like it might be for the last time.