After winning the battle for summer box office (and possibly becoming the year’s top earning domestic film), Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy may soon be posed to tackle that most fickle of mediums: trending on social media. ”Grooting,” as the kids call it, is the act of dancing behind someone without their knowledge and freezing in place when they turn around. It’s a nod to the heartwarming final scene of the movie where (spoilers?) a newly regenerated Baby Groot dances unbeknownst to Drax (Dave Bautista). So far there seems to be little traction of Grooting happening in real life, but the makers of the film are still trying to make it happen.
Michael Rooker and Dave Bautista re-enacted the moment at Wizard World Chicago, thus providing the added bonus of seeing Merle the homicidal racist from The Walking Dead shaking his booty at the man who once wrestled under the name Leviathan:
Then Grooting escalated at DragonCon thanks to writer/director James Gunn and his brother, Sean (who also pulled double duty on Guardians Of The Galaxy as both Kraglin and the on-set stand-in for Rocket Raccoon). Standing in front of a multitude of cosplayers, the Brothers Gunn coordinated an entire crowd to halt their dancing in adorable unison:
Is Grooting the new planking? (Remember planking? No? Okay.) It’s far too early to tell if Grooting will take off or be relegated to genre convention moments and solely propagated by the cast. But considering it’s based on an insanely popular movie where an entire act takes place in the severed head of a god robot, stranger things have happened.