If possible, you should go into Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 as clean as possible. There are a lot of huge surprises. However, now that the film is screening and the cast is doing interviews, spoilers are starting to leak—including some major ones at today’s press conference.
If you plan on seeing Guardians in the theaters, you should stop reading here. Trust us. But for you spoiler fans, here goes.
Near the end of the movie, new characters played by Ving Rhames and Michelle Yeoh appear. The credits (as well as James Gunn at the press conference) confirm they play Charlie-27 and Aleta Ogord, two ravager leaders in the film. Exactly why they appear is STILL too big of a spoiler to share, but in one of the five end-credits scenes, they meet up with Stakar, played by Sylvester Stallone, and two other aliens: Krugar and Mainframe. The five characters vow to get back together and steal some shit.
Yes, this is an on-screen reunion, with a few tweaks, of some of the original Guardians of the Galaxy team members. Stakar (a.k.a. Starhawk) Charlie-27, and Starhawk’s wife Aleta were all characters who, alongside Yondu, Major Vance Astro, Martinex, and Nikki Gold, formed the basis of the original Guardians team in the comics. Unlike the later team brought together in Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s 2008 Guardians book and popularized by James Gunn’s first movie, the original team operated in the 31st century and had little in the way of major connections with the “modern” team.
I spoke with Kevin Feige about the characters at today’s press junket, and he said he expects them to play some role in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3:
You will not see [Charlie-27 and Aleta] until [Guardians] 3 at the earliest. One of the original ideas was, James [Gunn] was fleshing out the character of Yondu... and having the fun of tipping our hat to the original Guardians team. [It] just gives James another set of tools to play with as he’s piecing together future stories.
When asked about possibly coming back for another film, Stallone played coy, joking that in Hollywood nothing is certain. He then let it slip that he’d begun to read more Guardians comics and when asked why, he said, “I’m optimistic.”
We’ll have more on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 soon.