Guardians of the Galaxy [Aug 2014]

[jgsugden]

Thanos will appear in this flick - and I'm hearing a whisper that it might be Nathan Fillion in the role. 

Looking forward to this flick more than ASM, X-Men, or Godzilla...

[Evildrider]

Meh.  As much as I like Fillion, I don't think he is right for Thanos.  Hell I would be happier if Vin did double duty as Groot and Thanos.

[jgsugden]

If it is Fillion, I imagine he'll be Thanos like Ruffalo is Hulk.  I don't think they'll entirely 'man in a suit' the character.

[Khaldun]

I can't imagine a worse miscast. But I like these guys, so if they think it's right, I'll wait and see. Makes no sense to me though. Sounds like that bullshit fucking nonsense from the Latino Review that certain overcredulous people around here keep posting like it isn't just some fan in his basement imagining it.

[Raguel]

Yeah I think he'd be a horrible villian. Almost as bad as that guy who played Doom in FF. He plays a great douchebag in other shows, but not an "embodiment of evil" type of guy.

[Father mike]

Fillion was a pretty bang-up bad-guy as Caleb in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.  Well, good enough that 10-years-ago me remembers him as being decent.

I'm willing to think it could work.

[Lantyssa]

The Hammer.

[Khaldun]

This is a giant deadly serious avatar-of-death we're talking about, though. Just doesn't seem Fillion's kind of gig.

[eldaec]

People are way too quick to say someone is miscast when they've never seen that actor in that type of role.

[Lantyssa]

Fillion can do serious.  He's very often playing the straight-man.  If it is him, I don't think it will be a problem at all.

[jgsugden]

He has a broader range than Mal, Captain Hammer, Caleb and Castle.  Of course, this is still speculation based upon Fillion's comments that he might be in GotG and the 'we won't tell you who Thanos is' comments.

[Hoax]

I doubt he is Thanos. Sounds like he gets a cameo but its def going to be a character they don't need to use in the future. Nothing about the comments anyone has made suggests a cameo of a pivotal character for future movieS.

Also Thanos is a huge badass. I cannot wait.

[Margalis]

Thanos also has a body like the Hulk's.

Maybe they can have a pro-wrestler play him, CGI the face and have a different person do the voice or something. Or find a wrestler who can act. They already have Batista in one movie. Hell, paint The Rock's face purple.

It's hard for me to imagine Thanos as skinny or normal sized. Even Thor should look a little shrimpy by comparison.

[Thrawn]

It's hard for me to imagine Thanos as skinny or normal sized. Even Thor should look a little shrimpy by comparison.

Maybe they will make him into a cloud so he's more ominous. 

[jgsugden]

As a reminder, Ruffalo does the acting for Hulk.... they use body capture.  They could be doing the same thing for Thanos.

[Margalis]

I don't think the Hulk in Avengers looked very good. He was also pretty much only onscreen for action moments, whereas I assume Thanos will, at some point in the future, be onscreen a fair amount just talking and such, so it's hard to imagine a CGI construct working, motion captured or not. I would definitely prefer a person to a CGI thing, even if that person doesn't have the right proportions.

[eldaec]

My guess is they'll make him look very different and a lot less ridiculous than he does in the comics. The amount of energy going in to building Thanos hype implies they are more confident in their interpretation than they have any right to be from the source material alone.

[Maven]

Marvel has a solid track record in its execution. I don't know how exactly it will look, but I expect Thanos to work.

Maybe they will make him into a cloud so he's more ominous.  

Amusing aside: it's truthful that the more inhuman your villian, the less interesting to the audience. I'm reminded of The Fifth Element -- the interesting antagonists were Gary Oldman and the muppet mercenaries than the planet-seeking amorphous force of evil.

Forces of nature and super-nature aren't as... sensical? We need human motivations (ghost wants revenge, evil wants power) and a human connection to what we're seeing.

Edit: refining theory.

[Lakov_Sanite]

To be fair the fifth element while an excellent movie did not really develop the force of evil much at all.

[Khaldun]

Actually, you guys are making me think. I actually hope they don't entirely go with Starlin's version of Thanos, who is not nearly as interesting as Starlin makes him out to be. But I wasn't terribly impressed with the recent attempt to lightly reboot him as a sort of OCD serial killer who may or may not be seeing (and loving) Death.

So maybe they're devoting some thought about what to do to make a Big Bad who is Thanos-like if not the traditional Starlin Thanos.

[Margalis]

The Starlin Thanos is a pretty classic bad guy who wants to become powerful and kill everybody. Why he wants to do that is different from other villains, but I can't see a Marvel comics movie playing up the angle that he is a servant of literal Death. I do think that is an interesting angle though.

In terms of what he wants to accomplish Thanos is pretty much the same as the bad guy in Thor 2 - collect some artifact(s) and use that artifact(s) to destroy the universe. Hell, the artifact in Thor 2 is even a subset of the artifacts Thanos wants.

Actually when I think about it that way it's kind of silly. That one artifact in Thor 2 was enough to almost destroy the universe. So Thanos is going to collect a bunch of those then...do the same thing the Thor 2 villain did?

[SurfD]

The artifact the Dark Elves wanted wasnt going to "destroy the universe", otherwise, the Elves wouldnt have anywhere to live afterwards.   They were going to use it to return the universe to a state of darkness, not literally unmake it like Thanos wants to.

[Margalis]

The artifact the Dark Elves wanted wasnt going to "destroy the universe", otherwise, the Elves wouldnt have anywhere to live afterwards.   They were going to use it to return the universe to a state of darkness, not literally unmake it like Thanos wants to.

This is basically a distinction without a difference. The process of doing what they wanted to do was going to destroy all 9 realms and all the people in it.

Also I don't think Thanos wants to unmake everything - then there would be no more death. At least in the classic Thanos Quest / Infinity Gauntlet story he wanted to kill half the life in the universe.

[Lakov_Sanite]

In Thor I always assumed the "9 realms" were just nine different planets, not the entire universe.

[Margalis]

In Norse mythology I believe the 9 worlds together cover pretty much everything outside of Valhalla and Fire/Ice places. But they didn't take into account space travel or other planets. So in that mythology if you destroyed the 9 worlds you destroyed pretty much everything I would think.

I'm not sure how that maps into the Marvel universe exactly. I don't think you can just fly on a spaceship from Earth to Asgard. It seems pretty purposefully vague, because it doesn't make a lot of sense when you try to map Norse myth to present-day understanding.

It's probably best not to think about it too much.  I guess if you really want to reconcile it they are best thought of as 9 planets that are somehow connected in some technobabble manner and in some way make up their own coherent system, such that destroying them does not destroy the entire universe but does from the perspective of the Yggdrasil-defined universe...so they are or are not the entire universe depending on which angle you view it from.

http://marvel.com/universe/Asgard

Yeah...basically who the hell knows?

[jgsugden]

Marvel comics, at least in the 80s and 90s, had inconsistent and conflicting cosmology.  The movie version is left a bit unclear, but straddles a line where the 9 realms could be on 9 different planets in the same universe, or on 9 different planes of existence.

[HaemishM]

Not exactly. They have said on the Agents of SHIELD that the Kree Empire is one of the nine realms, so I'm thinking it isn't different planes of existence.

[jgsugden]

Not exactly. They have said on the Agents of SHIELD that the Kree Empire is one of the nine realms, so I'm thinking it isn't different planes of existence.

I must have missed that statement?   Was that in the SIF episode?

[HaemishM]

Yes. Coulsen asked her about blue skinned aliens and she mentioned the Frost Giants and the Kree as races they've met in their travels through the Nine Realms.

EDIT: Alpha Centaurians were also mentioned - which is a shout out to Yondu from the original Guardians of the Galaxy.

[Tannhauser]

My take on the Nine Realms was one or more star systems the Asgardians consider their own.  Pretty sure she didn't say the Kree was from Midgard, Asgard, etc.  The GoG are not coming from any of the Nine Realms I'd say.

[Khaldun]

I don't think Sif meant that the Kree are a "Realm". I just think it means that Asgard is a futuristic space civilization in "our" universe, not in a dimension. The Nine Realms, judging from the two Thor movies, seem to be places that have hard-wired connections for some mysterious reason, but they exist within a larger universe of aliens, etc., whom I think we're about to see in GotG.

I am hoping they leave out the Skrulls, though. Really the standard MU would be better without them.

[Velorath]

They explain the 9 Realms quite clearly in Thor: Dark World:

[Lantyssa]

I thought the movies were set in something other than the 616 Universe.

[Evildrider]

Ya its supposed to be Earth-199999.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Yeah sif says she encountered kree but that could just mean one of the planets had a kree bartender.  They show all nine realms in thor 2 as planets so really that's what we need to go by in the movie continuity until they say otherwise.