Throwing a massive damper on the festivities of San Diego Comic-Con, the emerging news that Disney has fired James Gunn and severed all ties with the director of their hit ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ franchise in the wake of some early, distasteful tweets emerged. These “jokes” were posted online before he got famous and made light of rape, pedophilia, 9/11, AIDS and the Holocaust and were saved and resurfaced now. According to Fox News, these old tweets were released by a right-wing conservative group as a take-down of Gunn, an outspoken liberal. (It worked.)
Gunn issued a response via Twitter shortly after this news surfaced. You can read the original story with Gunn’s Twitter response here.
He has now issued a more official statement through Entertainment Weekly:
“My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative. I have regretted them for many years since — not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.
“Regardless of how much time has passed, I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then. All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies. Love to all.”
Gunn was set to return for his third and final ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movie soon for a 2020 release, and it seems like it was very close to being ready to film. With him gone, the fate of that movie is up in the air.
