James Gunn fired from Guardians of the Galaxy

Is it a justifiable firing? Or have we finally gone too far?

Let the debate begin...……………………………………..

Worth noting that it was a group of alt-rights who dug up those comments specifically to get this result, so whether the firing was justified or not they got what they want and that always sucks.

Disney should replace him with Rian Johnson!

Too far, but it's pretty clear why this happened. From Disney's perspective this is an easy decision, they have more money than god and are not willing to have Mr. Gunn sully their "good" name. From their perspective I'm sure it's just simpler to replace him.

Is this good? Probably not. Was James right to make those jokes? Probably not.

You should probably provide some actual context in the OP.

Anyway, in my opinion, it is absolutely fucking idiotic to fire someone from a movie in 2018 for jokes they made 10 years ago that have been publicly available this entire time. Is Disney gonna act like they didn't know who James Gunn was when he was hired? Did anyone there see Tromeo and Juliet? Did they even see Super? Everyone knew full well what Gunn's past work was.

It's even worse when you consider the source that dug up these tweets. It was right wing trolls like Jack Prilosec and Mike Cernovich who use this guise of progressiveness to dog pile someone while pretending like they are actually offended or give a shit about any of this. Meanwhile, go through Cernovich's tweet history and see how many rape apologist statements he's made. Yeah, I'm sure the guy who said "date rape doesn't exist" is really offended by tweets about the Giving Tree giving a blowjob.

If the cast of the movie has any spine, they'll refuse to do the movie without Gunn and Disney will realize how stupid this whole thing is.

Dumb. But it's Disney's decision to do it and if they pulled Roseanne, they should pull Gunn as well. Be prepared for many more like this to happen very soon now that people with too much time on their hands know what to do/look for.

James Gunn is free to make non-Guardians movie again. Not that I didn't love those movies but I'm really excited to see what he makes now (presumably with a budget).

What was the tweet and when did it happen? From what I've seen here so far it sounds like it was a long time ago and not a huge deal. Which just makes me immediately disappointed that Disney would be so ready and willing to toss the guy who helped Guardians of the Galaxy break into the mainstream. If I had more context I could actually properly react though.

Shitty twitter folks not withstanding, having seen some of the tweets its 10000000000% justified that he was fired. A bigger mystery is how he ever got in the position he was in (until recently) with that kind of insane stuff on his twitter. I get it that artistic creative types in such an industry can be a bit "out there" but you would think some HR/PR person would check on shit like this. That kind of stuff would/should get you fired, or at least a stern talking to from any company, public facing or not. But Disney of all places would most of all not want people to associate their brand/products/characters with the... more than questionable tweets of a sexual nature.

Also the people outraged at this firing because the "other side", you know the bad people that root for the bad team, not me who roots for the good team was involved in this are making the world/internet a worse place.

Skimming through some of those tweets (maybe I missed some of the more heinous ones, I dunno), he's said shit countless B- and C-tier comedians get up on stage and say every single night. A bunch of dumb, crass, over-the-top bullshit for shits and giggles. Hell, I might just argue he's tame compared to a lot of comedians. And it looks like it was all well before he jumped on the Marvel bandwagon. So, I mean...like...I don't see the problem with the tweets. Again, I just skimmed a few articles and none of the tweets those websites had seemed that bad, but maybe I'm missing something.

But Disney has an image to uphold, I guess, so I shouldn't be surprised. I will say this just made Guardians 3 a whole lot more fucking interesting. And not in a good way.

@mezza: There's a bunch of them from the early 2010s when he considered himself a taboo provocateur both in his movies and on Twitter. They've actually been brought up a few times before, and he's apologized and shown he's grown as a person, but of course once the right brings them back up and complains he's out the door in 24 hours somehow.

@milkman: Dunno if Jack Prilosec was an intended misspelling or not but either way, I will be calling him that from here on.

The "jokes" were dumb as fuck and Gunn himself seemed to realize that years later. It was embarrassing shock jock material. But yeah this is bullshit considering Mike Cernovich is one of the main alt-right folks who orchestrated this whole thing and if you wanna read about someone with actually horrid views take a look at his twitter profile.

It just kinda goes to show that mistakes you made online years ago can came back to haunt you in someway. But yeah, the circumstances behind this are kinda bullshit and Disney likely already knew about the tweets long before this.

This is one of those times that makes it clear Disney only cares that people are mad about it, not what actually happened. Are the jokes disgusting? Absolutely. But tweets are from ages ago, he's clearly changed and profusely apologized. All this was dug up because he was bad-mouthing Trump. It's a really, really bad look for Disney. There's no way they didn't know about this already with all their resources. Why even hire him in the first place? He's a goddamned Troma alum, this isn't all that surprising.

Firing him now is nothing more than capitulating to alt-right assholes. I'd like to remind everyone that goddamned John Lasseter still works at Disney. They let him round out the year, but fire James Gunn instantly for this? What about domestic abuser Johnny Depp?

Again, Disney doesn't care what happened, or who did it, they just saw that people were shouting and took the shortest route to shut them up. Disney has absolutely no moral ground to stand on here.

It's dumb and it'll ruin Guardians 3 which is a damn shame.

The tweets were also terrible of course, but it was years ago and he apologized already. How about giving someone the benrfit of the doubt for once/a second chance?

Also remember Walt Disney? Pretty messed up guy, but hsve they denounced him? No. Bunch of money loving hypocrites.

I hope Giant Bomb lasts forever because no one that works for the site will ever work again in the current environment because they once said a swear on the internet.

If these tweets are grounds for termination, I'd be put in front of a firing squad if shit me and my friends said to each other a decade ago got out... I mean, holy hell, the guy made Super and they hired him.

@geirr: It's an edgy and awful joke, but it's a joke. Obviously he didn't mean it. It he was posting this today sure, fire him, but that was close to ten years ago and he's not the kind of person who would make that kind of joke today.

Also let's not forget that while this is a especially bad case, most public figures have old things on the internet that if posted today would be reason for concern. Even the Giant Bomb crew is guilty of this, just go listen to some old bombcasts. The important thing is that we forgive and let them grow as people instead of making them pariahs their entire lives for something that no one looked twice at back then.

Is it weird that I think the tipping point for this attack campaign was initiated by James Gunn calling out the zealous Star Wars nerds? Maybe that Last Jedi remake will be funded by Alt-right money.

Heads on pikes. Is how the game is played now. Not surprised at all.

@geirr: There is no excuse for those tweets and I don't think there ever is a place for joking about those kinds of topics. But I can't get behind Disney's decision when you consider where the (fake) outcry came from and what group was behind this pushback. Disney is in a way siding with an actual self admitted rapist and misogynist Mike Cernovich.

I'm just surprised to see alt-righters supporting Gunn control.

...

Seriously though, no one comes out of this looking good. Still, an apology should have sufficed. I'm not defending the jokes, but remember who Gunn was before Guardians. Disney should have known who they were hiring and had him clean up his old tweets.

For me the comments by Gunn were vile and Disney firing him is what it is. However the reason why these almost decade old comments are coming back up, and the people responsible for there resurfacing are scumbags and I disappointed that they are going to be impowered by Disney's actions.

Patrick summed it up pretty nicely. Fuck Mike Cernovich.

I'm not going to dig through twitter to see what James Gunn has said over the last ten years but Disney knew who they were dealing with. This just seems spineless on their part.

Given the image that Disney (and Marvel to a slightly lesser extend) try to project, they really had no choice but to ditch James Gunn.

That said, Mike Cernovich is one of the biggest scumbags on the planet and absolutely no one is buying his feigned progressiveness and morality.

On Disneys part the firing might well be the "right" call since on their part somebodies just come along and dumped all this sewage on their lawn. How, Why, or how long ago it came to be probably doesn't matter they're probably just very interested in getting all this shit cleaned up so everyone stops staring at it.

Gunn wasn't some misguided youth being shitty on twitter so I have reservations on the "I was a different man back then" defense.

Finally there isn't a shred of good faith or call to justice in bringing him to account. It's a flock of shitty vultures who just happened to find a feast.

Basically it's all garbage, twitter sucks.

A lot of this shit happening these days, at least people are learning how detrimental careless social media comments can be in this day and age. I also find it laughable that this once again gets reduced to a partisan issue. Either saying stupid shit gets you fired or it doesn't (not saying I agree with it personally), politics should be irrelevant as far as I see it.

We live in a world where them sort of comments are widely unacceptable regardless of context or timing, the quality of character or motives of the person surfacing said comments shouldn't make a difference (again, not supporting the status quo but it is what it is, I would much prefer a world where someone could say the occasional dumb thing a decade ago without being lynched for it)

It's funny, Disney isn't doing a lot of work when they look at who they're getting to do these things it seems. First Roseanne (ABC/Disney), now Gunn.

Social Media, it's bad.

I'm a bit surprised that purging your tweets every month / year isn't common practice already. Especially as public figure.

Like if you really want to leave that past behind as you work for this company that is all about it's family-friendly image, maybe just get rid of the controversial stuff. What benefit does it have to keep that stuff around? Print it out and put it in your photoalbum if you want to reminisce on those times back when you were a 'provocateur' i guess. Mcdonalds wants spotless potatoes & Disney wants spotless employees. So brush away the controversial parts of you if you want to be a part of Disney.

An interesting take...

How do you feel about President Trump making statements 10 years ago and holding him accountable for those?

If Disney had any honest concern of an image to try and project they should have fired Johnny Depp when it was revealed he beats and abuses women.

@boonsong: I heard he threw a phone once. Is it a fact/proven that Depp has beat up women?

@deathstriker: How would you like it to be proven? You want Johnny to tell you he beat his ex?

Here’s a shocker - we’ve all of us said and done shitty things. Maybe we forgive if people have improved their behavior rather than dredging this shit up.

@retrometal: Blatant attempt to completely derail this thread but I'll bite for now.

It's kind of a nonsensical comparison because the implication would be that Trump is a different person than he was 10 years ago, which he very clearly is not. Gunn said these things 10 years ago and then apologized for them 6 years ago. He is clearly not the same person now as he was then. (For what it's worth, I'm not offended by Gunn's tweets. They were clearly jokes, some of them even made me laugh a bit.) Trump, on the other hand, seems to have little to no remorse for anything he's said in the past and besides, he says outrageously stupid shit daily for everyone to hear so the idea that you need to go back 10 years to something objectionable is pretty silly. And yes, if you're asking me if I hold the president of the United States to a different standard than I hold a guy who directs superhero movies, I do.

I enjoyed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and don't think any less of Mr. Gunn, but after seeing a bunch of the tweets, I understand why Disney would decide to part ways with him.

Social media is increasingly a pretty horrible thing, and even more so in the current environment, regardless of which way one leans politically and socially. This occurrence serves as yet another reminder to be extremely careful about what statements one makes on the Internet.

Remember when Disney's movies were racist as fuck? Apparently Disney doesn't.

A person should be held accountable for his or her own actions... but I don't think you should be fired for a bad joke you made a decade ago, no matter how bad the joke was. Everyone has said stupid shit, everyone has made an offensive joke and thought it was funny then.

It would be a problem if he had apologized, then continued to make bad jokes, but my understanding is that he stopped, apologized, and never did it again.

The lesson over the past few weeks seems to be "don't say anything on social media because someone, somewhere will take issue with it."

Thank god social media wasn't a thing back when I was a teenage asshole.

Disney hired the guy who fucking wrote Terror Firmer and Tromeo and Juliet, and he made those jokes basically up to the day he was hired by Disney to make the original GotG. Disney knew exactly what his dumbass, disgusting past work was. They knew exactly the kinds of dumbass, disgusting shit he said, wrote, and directed. And Gunn owned up to this stuff and apologized for it in 2012, when he was hired by Disney and put under the public microscope, and has basically never done it again. More importantly, he seems to be a totally different person now. Whatever the case, these tweets were not news to Disney today. They are purely reacting to the sudden intense attention drawn to them in bad faith by admitted rapist Mike Cernovich.

Also anyone who says that Roseanne or Trump are good comparison points is willfully dense and should be fucking ignored

Two things to learn from the past month:

1. Corporations will prioritize protecting their bottom-line regardless of context, situation, who you are or any sort of morality to speak of.
2. Twitter was a horrible mistake and the world would be far better off if it suddenly vanished and something like it never returned.

Cernovich deserves something that I shouldn't say on this website but its not like a good portion of Hollywood isn't insanely terrible too so my reaction is

James Gunn is a piece of shit but so are Nazis like cernovich thanks

Been thinking about this all day. Fuck, what a sobering development. Just straight-up like this is where we're at. I dunno why this was the straw that did it, but here we are. Cernobich and his clown-ass, Disney being fuckin Disney, "weaponized the left's morality." The fuck outta here. What an absolute joke.

The tweets were stupid and potentially offensive, but they were from 10 years ago and it's not especially surprising. Usually when this sort of thing happens it is about race. That's to some degree justifiable, depending on the context, if it shows that the person is an irredeemable racist. But, I really don't think many people at these tweets and think that Gunn is in fact a pedophile. They think "ugh, comedians."

It's a bit weird to me when people see this and say things like "Disney is being greedy" etc. I mean, yeah. They're a giant corporation. They exist solely to make money. The question to me is - will this work to actually help their bottom line? My guess is, no. Nobody would have been out protesting against Disney for this, and they'll probably lose some revenue on Guardians 3 and anything else Gunn would have done for them. I know Disney has a reputation to protect, but when they are swallowing up darker material like the Marvel universe and putting it under the Disney label they are already giving up some of their family-friendly nature. Really, I think that nobody would care. I mean, they happily employ Sarah Silverman and she has also said some crazy things I think.

Deadpool 2 had jokes about both rape and pedophilia. If he had some fucked up views on those sorts of things I'd completely understand. But they were bad jokes that he then apologized for. This sets a bad precedent.

Its absolutely idiotic and this Twitter archeology and firings are starting to resemble a Black Mirror episode. Next thing you know they’ll impeach the president over twitter because he’ll call someone a dick in a tweet.