James Gunn confirmed a recent story that Marvel Studios originally planned to introduce the Guardians of the Galaxy through a series of short films that would have been released before the full Guardians movies. He also revealed that he had gone so far into the prequel projects that he actually filmed footage for the Rocket and Groot one-shot.

As one of the many revelations from the new book, The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige revealed, "We toyed with the idea of doing short films on Drax, on Rocket and Groot, and on Gamora, leading up to Guardians. This One-Shot series would have led into the Guardians movie proper -- which would have also been directly preceded by a fourth self-contained short film about a mysterious kid who loved fantasy things. Then you'd start Guardians. And half-way through, we would reveal that big space hero is the kid from the short. We thought that would be clever, but it was too much."

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Responding to a Screen Rant article on the revelation, Gunn posted on Twitter, "I forgot about this, but this is true. Not only did we plan it, we shot footage for one of the scripts (Rocket & Groot) - part of which was the first shot of Rocket shooting a machine gun on Groot’s back that we showed at San Diego Comic Con."

Gunn continued, "There were going to be 4 - Rocket & Groot, Gamora, Drax, & Star-Lord. Only the Rocket & Groot script was fully finished, but it was also completely storyboarded. It was the story of how they met & I still think it’s true in my headcanon. Also I wrote a role for Alan Tudyk in it!"

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"We didn’t end up doing it because I realized it was ridiculous for me to be writing & directing 4 short films at the same time as I was prepping an enormous world-building movie," Gunn continued. "The 3 shorts were going to play before the 3 movies coming out before Guardians - which seemed like a good idea to get people to know them since everyone was telling us these unknown characters were going to be 'Marvel's first bomb.'"

He concluded by explaining, "The 4th short was going to be Quill's backstory which is really what's at the beginning of Guardians now. It was really hard for me to admit it was too much for me & I was sad deciding I couldn’t do them (especially Rocket & Groot). But, you know, maybe someday!"

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Source: Twitter