Not too long ago, James Gunn was but a Troma (and law school) graduate with some very weird but inspired writing and directing credits under his belt, including Super, a superhero movie about a disturbed man who murders people with a wrench, and the cult classic Slither. He was also the extremely bankable screenwriter of such popular reboots of childhood favorites like Dawn Of The Dead and the Scooby Doo movies.
Then, this quintessential comic-book geek and pop-culture nerd was given the keys to one of Marvel’s lesser properties, an oddball superhero team-up collectively known as Guardians Of The Galaxy. The film exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations en route to becoming not just one of the year’s biggest and most buzzed-about hits, but also a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. It was the kind of all-time smash that transforms a quirky filmmaker into a bona fide master of the universe.
Accordingly, a Guardians Of The Galaxy sequel is in the works, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, one of Gunn’s old scripts is going to be dusted off and made for an audience newly receptive to his genius. Gunn will be writing and producing, but not directing, American Belco. On his very active Facebook page, Gunn wries that the movie “revolves around the American Belco company in South America, which is mysteriously sealed off at the beginning of a work day, and its employees are ordered to kill each other or be killed themselves. This starts an escalation of violence, where we discover the true nature of each and every Belco employee.”
That sounds awfully grim, but Gunn also promises “the heart and humor my films have all had,” so maybe at a moment of peak bleakness, everyone will start dancing to Super-Hits from the 1970s. Hey, it worked before.
The film will be directed by Australian Greg McLean, who previously directed Wolf Creek, which is one of those degenerate torture-porn movies my colleague Scott Tobias just loves because he loves to see people tortured and he loves to torture people himself. McLean and Gunn seem like a smart, sick pairing.
Gunn says he wrote the script “a few years ago…in a two-week fugue state.” He also claims to have written Super in a fugue state. Apparently Gunn’s writing process is this:
- Enter fugue state for several weeks.
- Emerge with a finished screenplay.
Marvel must be hoping he enters one hell of a fugue state before writing Guardians Of The Galaxy Two: The Desolation Of Smaug. The Belco Experiment begins production in June in Bogota, Columbia.