While James Gunn has clearly pulled off one of the movie of the year with ‘Guardians of the Galaxy‘ there was so much more that he wanted to do but couldn’t due to Marvel not owning the rights to the characters. Would the ones left out have made a huge impact on the film? Who were these mysterious heroes and villains that couldn’t be included in the movie? Hold on tight True Believers as we’re about to dive into the deep end and take a look!

First up is one that I would have never expected as Gunn revealed, ”There’s characters that I’ve been interested in that I’m not allowed to use but I won’t go so far as to say I definitely would have had them. There was a really good chance Bug was going to show up in the first movie but we do not own him… but, anyway, that was going to happen, perhaps.”

Bug was initially a Micronaut which means he was based off of a toy from Takara Co turned comic character. Introduced as a Galactic Warrior, they changed his name to Bug as he really doesn’t look like the toy and with a different name they could assume ownership. Bug lasted long enough to even become one of the members of the Guardians of the Galaxy and while they seem to still have the comic rights, it had to have been a cinematic issue here.

Next up is a character who Gunn was clearly more interested in. “Listen, I really love Rom: Spaceknight, as everyone at Marvel knows because they’ve given me Rom stuff… but we don’t own Rom. I would love for Rom: Spaceknight to show up because I love his story, I love the way he looks, I love everything about him…”

While Marvel released the comic of Rom The Space Knight, Parker Brothers created it first as a toy and while he’s in continuity in the comics, they no longer have the comic rights to Rom let alone the movie rights.

The big one, though, was on the enemy front and included a set of characters I would have loved to have seen show up on the big screen. “There are other characters but basically, some characters we can work around and we can use,” saya Gun. “Listen, I wanted to use the Badoon, but the Badoon we don’t own… they’re really interesting. They would be like the cannon fodder guys who were like the Sakaaran in my movie… I wrote them as Badoon but I just did a search-replace-Sakaaran when I found out we didn’t have Badoon. It was strangely late in the process when I found that out. They were designed as Badoon.”

Clearly the rights to the Badoon are elsewhere (say Fox with the ‘X-Men’) but it does explain how the Sakaaran ended up acting for the scenes they were in.

Do you think you would have preferred the film with the original ideas that he had for it or do you think that it wouldn’t have made a difference? Share your thoughts below!

Source: Comic Book