5. Guardians Of The Galaxy
Release date: August 1st With a cast including a feisty gun-toting raccoon and a tree-creature who only delivers one line, Guardians of the Galaxy is not your average guy-in-tights-with-superpowers-saves-the-world comic book picture. Throw in a mid-credits set up during Thor that was baffling to anyone but a proper Marvel fan, a star best known for a sitcom with critical acclaim but perennially low ratings, and a director whose work is stridently B-movie and whose previous superhero film was the little seen cynical parody Super, and you've got something very far from a sure thing. While all of this may scupper Guardians of the Galaxy's chances of success, it may also be just the thing it has going for it. Director James Gunn's Troma-trained grounding in schlocky productions could give Guardians the sense of irreverent anything-goes fun that this kind of nonsense needs, while Chris Pratt is an actor clearly set for bigger things in comedy film (indeed his central role in the Lego Movie could provide this year's other slice of imaginatively silly fun). The rest of the cast, meanwhile, are old hands at this sort of thing and should provide a steadying influence. Doctor Who's Karen Gillan, now bald and villainous, has endless amounts of space monster experience, Avatar's Zoe Saldana just has to switch her blue humanoid alien for a green one, and The Iron Giant's Vin Diesel is quite capable of voicing a seemingly emotionless creature of few words and doing something with it. It only seems a shame that Gunn could find no place in his space opera romp for frequent collaborator Nathan Fillion.