Marvel has been smart and careful with Adam Warlock, Guardians 3’s sleeper superhero

polygon.com:

Does anyone still working at Marvel Studios have any personal passion about Adam Warlock, the big golden guy played by Will Poulter in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3? There haven’t been a whole lot of signs yet that they do — and it’s going to be an important question for the character’s future.

While Guardians 3 finally brings Adam Warlock — the Savior, the Avatar of Life, the head of the Universal Church of Truth — to the screen after multiple teases (in thefirst andsecond Guardians movies), James Gunn is the only Marvel director who’s shown any interest in the character so far. With Gunn moving on to help run DC’s superhero-movie slate, leaving his Guardians series behind and wrapping up the story of the original team lineup, his entire slate of characters is now potentially up for grabs. That means someone else is going to have to decide who to highlight in any future Marvel Cinematic Universe story featuring the Guardians, and it may be up to them whether Adam Warlock makes the cut. That makesVol. 3’s approach to the character seem like a smart, carefully calculated play on Marvel’s part.

The movie introduces Adam Warlock as young and hapless, mostly a comic-relief character. (Which doesn’t exactly make him stand out among the rest of the Guardians lineup.) He’s literally unfinished: We’re told that the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), popped Adam out of his creation cocoon “too early,” leaving him malleable and a bit child-like. Adam has nearly Superman-level power: He can fly, he doesn’t need any sort of special gear to survive comfortably in the vacuum of space, he’s incredibly strong and fast, and while he clearly isn’t invulnerable, he apparently heals very quickly. But in this first