James Gunn Couldn't Use Rom, Bug Or The Badoon In Guardians of the Galaxy

Fans of the Abnett and Lanning Guardians of the Galaxy comic book would have loved to have seen Bug in the movie, and fans of the original characters would have loved to have seen The Badoon.

Another fan-favorite character is Rom The Spaceknight.

It turns out the three may have had a chance of appearing in the movie if only Marvel held the film rights to the characters.

Rom The Spaceknight is owned by Hasbro as is Bug, as Bug is first considered a member of the Micronauts.

The Badoon are owned by Fox as the Badoon first appeared in Silver Surfer, which Fox Studios owns the film rights to as well.

James Gunn recently spoke about the characters with Geek Nation:

There’s characters that I’ve been interested in that I’m not allowed to use but I won’t go so far as to say I definitely would have had them. There was a really good chance Bug was going to show up in the first movie but we do not own him… but, anyway, that was going to happen, perhaps. Listen, I really love Rom: Spaceknight, as everyone at Marvel knows because they’ve given me Rom stuff… but we don’t own Rom. I would love for Rom: Spaceknight to show up because I love his story, I love the way he looks, I love everything about him… There are other characters, but basically, some characters we can work around and we can use. Listen, I wanted to use the Badoon, but the Badoon we don’t own… they’re really interesting. They would be like the cannon fodder guys who were like the Sakaaran in my movie… I wrote them as Badoon but I just did a search-replace-Sakaaran when I found out we didn’t have Badoon. It was strangely late in the process when I found that out. They were designed as Badoon.