SPOILER ALERT: This article touches on the endings of several Marvel movies including ‘Iron Man 3’ and ‘The Avengers.’  If you still haven’t seen either of them, you have been warned!

While mainstream audiences keep hearing rumblings about this upcoming Marvel film ‘Guardians of the Galaxy‘ and wondering what it’s about, comic fans have struggled to explain the concept and most have boiled it down to the simple line “It’s like Avengers but in space.”  Unfortunately, it sounds like we’ve been spinning it wrong.

According to Karen Gillan, the former ‘Doctor Who’ star who portrays Nebula in ‘Guardians’, “What’s different about ‘Guardians’ is that, all the heroes, everybody [in the movie] is a bad guy.  There’s just good guys within the bad guys.”

Sounds like these guys are more Han Solo than Luke Skywalker.  At Comic-Con, a teaser was shown wherein John C. Reilly’s character, Rhomann Dey quips that the super team is “a bunch of assholes.”  So I guess that explains that.

It also increasingly seems that ‘Guardians’ exists in its own portion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Plans for Tony Stark to fly into space and encounter the alien force after the credits of ‘Iron Man 3’ were scrapped in favor of his therapy session with Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner.  The most logical tie the movie could have with the larger Marvel Universe would be to encounter Thanos, the villain who so famously cameoed in ‘The Avengers’, but who will not, as originally suspected, be the villain in the second ‘Avengers’ which has been revealed to be subtitled ‘The Age of Ultron‘.  However, while ‘Guardians’ is loaded with villains, including Gillan’s Nebula, as well as Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser, Benicio Del Toro as The Collector and Djimon Hounsou as Korath the Pursuer, there’s been no mention of Thanos.  With so many existing villains, there probably isn’t room anyway.

But let’s be honest, Robert Downey Jr’s jerky depiction of Iron Man has proven to be the most successful of the Marvel heroes at the box office and he was rightly used to anchor ‘The Avengers.’  So audiences should have no trouble taking to some edgier heroes like the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’.  What do you think?

‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ is set to premiere on August 1st, 2014.