First official Guardians of the Galaxy movie promo photo released with entire main cast

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy movie is on many fans' watch lists for 2014 for a variety of reasons. It's another building block in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's probably the riskiest movie to come out of Marvel Studios and it's unique. Very little footage from the film has surfaced online, but Marvel has released an official promo photo for the movie to give fans an idea of what to expect.

Director James Gunn posted the photo on his official Twitter page with the caption "Very early #GotG still released by Disney today." You can check out the photo below, which includes the full main cast (from left to right: Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Bradley Cooper as the voice of Rocket Raccoon, Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer and Vin Diesel as the voice of Groot):

An article in Empire Magazine reveals how the Guardians of the Galaxy team comes together. Peter Quill gets thrown in prison and the team unites to break out and "go after a treasure that they all want for different reasons." Director James Gunn elaborated in the article:

"Our characters are basically all villains to begin with. They don't believe they're individually good and they don't believe each other is good, and through the course of the movie they discover they're heroes. If The Avengers are The Beatles, these guys are The Rolling Stones."

In the interview, Pratt acknowledged that the film could be a risk but reasoned that every Marvel movie has been a risk and has paid off "really big."

Guardians of the Galaxy hits theaters in the United States on Aug. 1.