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Update: Disney Refuses To Reverse James Gunn Firing Decision
Update: Since The Guardians Of The Galaxy director's Gunn's firing after a series of controversial tweets, there's been a huge group of fans and activists demanding he be reinstated. The film's cast has also been vocal about standing behind the director. However, it looks like the director is definitively not returning to the project.
Variety reports that Disney CEO Alan Horn took a courtesy meeting with Gunn. Though the publication describes the meeting as civil, Disney and Marvel aren't reversing the decision.
It is currently unknown who will replace Gunn and whether or not they'll use the his script.
Original Story (July 20 at 3:10 p.m. Central)
James Gunn, director of the first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, has been fired from the third movie by Disney.
Gunn is well-known as an outspoken critic of president Trump and the Republican party and had become much more frequent in his criticism over the last two weeks. This provoked a response from top conservative voices on Twitter such as Jack Posobiec and conservative magazine The Daily Caller, who combed through Gunn's Twitter feed. Posobiec and others discovered tweets from Gunn dating back ten years where Gunn acted as a provocateur and made offensive jokes.
A favorite taboo subject of Gunn's was to joke about pedophilia, putting himself as the punchline sometimes cast as the victim and sometimes the rapist. The tweets in question were mostly from 2008 and 2009, but went viral in the last few days. Gunn attempted to delete them, but screenshots were taken and shared alongside calls for Disney to remove Gunn from his executive director position within the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand.
Yesterday, Gunn expressed regret about the old tweets and tweeted out an explanation. "Many people who have followed my career know when I started, I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo," Gunn said. "As I have discussed publicly many times, as I’ve developed as a person, so has my work and my humor."
Disney seems unmoved by this explanation and fired Gunn today.
"The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him," Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said in a statement released today and given to The Hollywood Reporter.
Gunn was also an executive for this year's Avengers: Infinity War and next year's still unnamed follow-up Avengers movie. In the past, Gunn wrote the Warner Bros. and Grasshopper Manufacture game Lollipop Chainsaw.
[Source: The Hollywood Reporter]
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