Branching out or nipped in the bud? Could Groot be getting a solo Marvel movie?

Vin Diesel is excited by the possibility of the talking tree in its own movie – but with only three words to play with, the chances of a whole film set on Planet X are stick thin.

here comes a time in every veteran actor’s career when they ask themselves: have I spent too long playing a large, talking tree? But for Vin Diesel, that moment is clearly yet to arrive. More than a decade after he first portrayed Groot in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the action star is still giddy with excitement about the prospect of stepping into the studio once again and uttering the three simple, anodyne words with which his character has become synonymous, over and over again. In an Instagram post this week, Diesel revealed that Marvel is considering some kind of Groot movie – or at least, we think that’s what he was saying. “Disney wants their Planet X! Which some say is Marvel’s most anticipated movie, haha,” wrote Diesel. “The film where Groot returns to his home planet.”

For those of you not familiar with the comics, Diesel is referring to the homeworld of Groot and his species, the Flora Colossi. Imagine if the Ents from The Lord of the Rings had taken over all of Middle-earth, invented spectacular technologies, delivered the most sustainable urban planning in the galaxy, and yet somehow regressed to sentences of no more than three words. That is an awful lot like what Planet X looks like. According to the comics, though, the Flora Colossi are not really speaking three words of English; that’s just what it sounds like to anyone who can’t understand the subtle inflections in tone and the deeply complex linguistic structures that, when heard by an educated listener, might mean the giant talking tree in question is in fact discussing the finer points of quantum physics, or reciting the Instructions of Shuruppak.

This is an excellent joke which has sustained Groot through six movies, a Disney+ series, and a Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special. But the time has come to ponder whether even such a magnificently absurd gag can be the sturdy trunk around which an entire movie could be set in Marvel’s increasingly desperate content machine.

Are we really likely to sit through two hours of a Dune-like political epic in which various factions of Flora Colossi battle for control of the planet’s most valuable resource – premium mulch? – while audiences try to understand who is betraying whom through the nuance of bark texture alone? Perhaps the film could manifest as a tense arboreal hostage thriller in which negotiators are forced to interpret the shifting vocal timbre of “I am Groot” to determine whether our hero is bluffing, breaking down, or just politely asking for more sunlight.

There are endless permutations, but how far is Marvel really going to take this thing before we all collapse from exhaustion? The reality is that Diesel is probably exaggerating: the studio has a long history of borrowing iconic comic book storylines, stripping them for parts, then bolting those bits on to entirely different cinematic vehicles. There were once rumours of a full-blown Planet Hulk movie, for example, but instead we got Thor: Ragnarok, a film that borrowed all the best bits of the classic Marvel graphic novel – gladiatorial mayhem, a crumbling Sakaar, and the Hulk’s tragic exile – but managed to turn the not-so-jolly green giant into a goofy sidekick to the son of Odin.

This is how Marvel tends to flow – not that this is always a bad thing. Comic books and movies are very different creatures, and sometimes a 12-issue existential crisis about the nature of artificial intelligence works better as a two-hour CGI punch-up with jokes about lifting Thor’s hammer. But it does raise the question of quite how the studio plans to transform the tale of a planet of talking trees into something audiences can munch popcorn and cheer to. There’s a reason a lot of the comic books only mentioned Planet X as a sort of distant, semi-mythic place of ancient wisdom and ecological mysticism instead of spending entire issues there, just as Star Wars wisely keeps its deep-force meditation planets as brief detours while everyone gets back to the important business of laser sword fights and defeating space fascism.