The Guardians of the Galaxy Made the MCU’s First Real Trilogy, and Maybe Its Last, Too

In 2023, nearly 15 years into the Marvel Cinematic Universe project, one of the beloved franchise’s many sub-series has become the first to complete a home-studio trilogy under the same director, with a capper featuring strange creatures and cosmic-looking new worlds. That trilogy, unfortunately, is Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man series, which recently concluded with a notably baffling splat in the form of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. There isn’t a moment where Ant-Man 3 feels like any kind of finale; to the contrary, it was trumpeted (and then disappointed) as a kick-off to Marvel’s next big Phase, one more cog in the perpetual motion machine. If anything, it made the Ant-Man movies feel flimsier and less cohesive than ever.
The second entry in Marvel’s newest Phase Whatever, though, also manages the same-director trifecta, and more clearly has closure on its mind. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens this week, and it’s not a spoiler to confirm what its trailers, press, and reviews have already said: It feels like the end of this series in this form. Characters may pop up again – Marvel characters so often do – but writer-director James Gunn is heading out to run DC, and the collective story of Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), Groot (Vin Diesel), Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan), and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) seems to be completed. (Is now the time to lobby for The Nebula Adventures?)
This isn’t the first Marvel mini-series to reach the vaunted trilogy mark – as mentioned, it’s not even the first one this year. But it does seem to represent the best shot at what the MCU seemed to initially promise: a series of movies that exist within a broader cinematic universe while satisfying their own wants and needs as a distinctive set. Iron Man came close, by virtue of the first two Iron Man movies coming out before Thor or Captain America had been assembled. But Tony Stark’s character (or, more accurately, his popularity) required more arcs, including some that seemed to at least partially undo what actually happens in Iron Man 3. (We call this an arc reactor.) Something similar happened when Captain America: Civil War wrapped up the series by turning into a de facto Avengers sequel (heavily featuring, not coincidentally, Tony Stark), and when Spider-Man: No Way Home, a coproduction with Sony, brought in ringers from past Spider-Man movies for a multiverse crossover extravaganza. Thor has been touch and go over four entries, while Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel haven’t yet made it to three, in part because of all the big-picture sidetracking.
That leaves Guardians as the last ones standing – or, as Rocket grouses in the first film, “a bunch of jackasses, standing in a circle.” Though 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy seems likely to remain the most beloved of the trilogy for its capacity to surprise audiences. In retrospect, it’s remarkable how many MCU touchstones this supposed outlier hits: Its color scheme, while more detailed than a lot of later Marvel movies, is often low-contrast and murky; its action sequences, especially toward the end, are senseless sprays of CG oriented around a gigantic (and generic) airship; some of its humor is more clunky sarcasm than actual zingers; and a substantial portion of the plot concerns the pursuit of a magical stone that will become more important later on.
Still, the characters are distinctive enough to build a series around; the squabbling team-up takes Gunn about 40 minutes to assemble, a feat the larger MCU needed years and multiple origin stories to pull off. And with a bunch of tedious Thanos bullshit out of the way in that first movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 makes a case for the Guardians exerting control over their own destiny. While the first Guardians drew the expected Star Wars comparisons – much of the movie does play as if some random denizens of the Mos Eisley cantina received that Joseph Campbell call to adventure rather than a farmboy — Vol. 2 doesn’t much resemble that beloved film series. Instead, it establishes Gunn’s baby as kind of a ragged, semi-foulmouthed Star Trek, full of loopy sights and unsustainable, unstable planets. The fact that Vol. 2, which spends a lot of time exploring the parentage of its least essential member (Pratt’s Star-Lord), meanders a bit in the self-created extension-of-self planet created by Star-Lord’s dad Ego (Kurt Russell) only makes it a headier, weirder, more eccentric movie. It’s one of the few MCU projects that could be credibly accused of noodling.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 does a more serious form of noodling, and in doing so runs in even closer parallel to Star Trek, merging personal strife with exploratory whimsy. The movie sprawls into Rocket’s backstory, depicted in full flashback scenes rather than an expositional prologue; meanwhile, in the present-day rush to retrieve a McGuffin that will save Rocket’s life, the Guardians visit a squishily organic corporate headquarter as well as Counter-Earth, a planet serving as a desaturated copy of the original, repopulated by genetic experiments. These are Trek planets all the way, weird and conceptual rather than practical (or imitative of Star Wars). The Guardians have made their headquarters in Knowhere, a gigantic space station located in the skull of an ancient godlike being; it’s a more nomadic version of Trek, where none of these misfits have a traditional home base, reinforced by the way these strange new worlds offer more gimmickry than comfort.