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‘GUARDIANS OF THE Galaxy’ franchise director James Gunn has been axed from the third movie over a series of offensive messages posted on Twitter several years ago.
The tweets, mainly from 2008 and 2011, joked about taboo topics such as rape and paedophilia.
Disney, which owns the franchise as the parent company of Marvel Studios, sent AFP a statement confirming the studio was parting ways with one of its biggest stars.
“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,” said Alan Horn, chairman of Walt Disney Studios.
Gunn has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump and has drawn the ire of conservative critics, who went back through his timeline and dug up the tweets.
Jack Posobiec of The Daily Caller and right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich are among those who unearthed the messages.
“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 wrote on Twitter after the offensive tweets resurfaced late on Thursday.
As I have discussed publicly many times, as I’ve developed as a person, so has my work and my humour.
Gunn, who has deleted his account, described himself as a “very, very different” person than when he wrote the tweets, now focusing on love rather than anger.
“My days saying something just because it’s shocking and trying to get a reaction are over,” he added.
Gunn directed both Guardians of the Galaxy films, and was planning to head to San Diego’s huge annual Comic-Con fan convention this week with a secret film project that he had teased on Instagram.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is due out in 2020.
Fire everybody…
@An Observer2: Conservatives using the tactics of the far left this past decade. It’ll only make matters worse.
Are we to now go through the back catalogue of every comedian too?
In 10 years the landscape we see now will be very different as there’s a big fightback against PC and it’s beginning to lose. Will we then go after, pitchforks in hand, all of the anti-free speech liberals and get them fired?
We have to stop this nonsense. It’s so, so destructive.
@niall: it was only a matter of time before the conservative side started to do this.
Gunn was targeting Ben Shapiro. He should have expected this.
The Hollywood liberals have a lot more to hide than their political enemies
@An Observer2: There are topics that shouldn’t be joked about. Rape & paedophilia are no joking matters.
@Slim Shady: That’s not for you to decide. Jokes, are all about context. Jokes are usually at someone elses expense. No-one has the right to be free from offence. Yes, such jokes can be distaseful, but a good barometer of where things are at is the refusal now of comedians to go anywhere near college campuses.
@niall: When a person jokes about such things I can only assume they haven’t experienced it. Distasteful is the mildest word I could use. It says a lot about him
@niall: they are only jokes when somebody finds them funny. I don’t find rape jokes funny. To me they are not jokes, but an expression of the tellers view of the world. If they find this funny….
@andrew: you may not find them funny as it’s subjective. Many others may find them funny, and often the best jokes come from saying things you’re not ‘supposed’ to say…Frankie Boyle etc
@DrRexButts: If that’s creativity I’m glad I’m not creative in that way. I think I have a good sense of humour & have been told by different people that I’m great craic but that brand of ‘humour’ is not for me.
@DrRexButts: Now you’re just being silly.
@Slim Shady: your sense of humour is irrelevant. Humour is about context and entirely subjective.
I haven’t seen the comments but it’s a shame that a great director who made two great films has lost his the chance to direct a third one.
@Stephen Adam: Your opinion is irrelevant to me.
@niall: so if somebody finds something funny it must be a good joke regardless of the subject matter. The problem with yr subjective argument is that it really nails the person laughing. Tell a few rape jokes to yr kids (if you have any) just to put it all to the test.
@Slim Shady: Slim, making a joke about rape and physically raping someone are 2 very different things. Firing somebody for making a distasteful joke years ago is pathetic.
Not funny but hardly worthy of being fired. This is getting ridiculous.
@Maggie Elizabeth Walsh: Disney knew he made those tweets years ago. He apologised in 2012.
Wasn’t Walt Disney a well documented racist?
@Fergus O’Connor: Yeah, I find Darby O’Gill upsetting #metoo
@Ruairi Gagarin: too right! That Pony Sugrue was a racist.
@Fergus O’Connor: Disney are very defensive about that. Apparently there’s absolutely no evidence he was racist what so ever, he just hung out with them(despite other studios refusing to do busines s with the same people) and despite him having an almost pathological iron grip on what was produced at his studios having to OK nearly every frame of animation one or two entire cartoons might have been released with anti-Semitic content (see the big bad wolf) but it had absolutely nothing to do with Disney himself…if you know what I mean…
@Fergus O’Connor: There’s a push on in Ireland to wipe historical figures with the wrong views from history too – exactly like the Romans did. Everybody it seems has to be judged by today’s mores, rather than accepting the reality they were products of their time.
Worse again. there’s a push on to eradicate history itself as a subject from primary schools in Ireland. This is beyond all belief to me. Sheer, evil ideology.
@niall: A product of his time? Walt Disney was an American Nazi sympathiser while the US were fighting against the same people.
Hardly a product of his time. Let’s not pollute the comments with that rubbish.
@niall: I’m fairly sure that at the time Disney was dabbling in Nazism it was considered pretty bad too.. hence none of the other studios even meeting with some of the people he was doing business with…
Anyone know what the jokes were?
In the eyes of Disney apparently not funny.
@Ennui Kenny: thanks. That’s a lot of paedophile jokes.
@Veronica: Jokes being the operative word. Another heatwave please… Seems some snowflakes survived the most recent one.
@Tommy Roche: im all for free speech but you can’t have a free pass to say whatever you want,however hate filled it may be,by simply labelling those you offend as “snowflakes”.
@Veronica: I am a with you on that, very odd. I don’t even get how they are jokes in most of the cases, particularly the raping of a boy because Avengers is so manly. Bizarre.
@Tommy Roche: If everyone who ever said anything inappropriate were to be sacked we’d all be on the dole, there has to be something else going on here.
@Tommy Roche: some of the tweets were pretty sick and not remotely funny, even by a 14 year old’s humour. However, Gunn was in his 40s when he was tweeting this filth. “I’ve grown as a person” doesn’t cut it. It makes him sound like some 30 year old embarrassed by idiotic things he said in his teens. Not some 51 year old apologising for provocative and juvenile statements he made in his 40s. How can Disney be expected to maintain an association with someone like that? Good enough for him.
@Veronica: Yes, no jokes about women… better luck next time
@Molehead: Dodgy fukker, not really jokes at all and more likely his fantasies. And paedo jokes aren’t that humours when you have kids of your own.
The thought police are starting to get a little bit dangerous
@Moss Cotter: but this guy was part of the thought police. He was targeting Ben Shapiro….
@Fiasco99: this isn’t a matter of the left versus the right, free speech is crucial for all spectrums of thought, I imagine Shapiro would have some sympathy for gunn here
@Moss Cotter: Absolutely, and I think Shapiro will defend him all guns blazing.
Never thought I’d say this but as every day goes by, Fox News gets more and more appealing, and carries more truth than the rest.
Disney who vets even people in costume at DisneyLand, had to of known about the tweets, they vet everyone, he also did a full disclosure of the tweets right before the filming of his first movie, Gunn has been know to make dark, twisted comedies in the past, these jokes would not have been out of character “at that time”. I do feel feel sorry for Gunn for losing his job over something he apologised for, )grew older and evolved) from jokes.
But it was only a matter of time before the conservatives started using this sort of tactics to hit back at the left
@Lisa Byrne: They 100% knew about his Troma film work so I can’t imagine that they didn’t expect twisted humour. Interesting to see what happens next as they were touting him as a successor to Feige.
@Lisa Byrne: They aren’t going to read through 21,000 tweets, if they had they’d either have not hired him or asked him to delete the “jokes”.
@Shane Corry: 21,000 tweets, not necessarily, he made a full disclosure right before filming the first of the movies, he addressed the tweets, Disney wouldn’t have to go through 21k tweets, also his movies are dark, twisted and have this kind of humour in them, Disney knew full well.
These jokes aren’t even funny, should be fired for wasting peoples time if nothing else
A joke….
Look up Steve Hughes stand up joke about people being offended on YouTube
I see they left out the part where he also tweeted link to child porn . Seems it was not just jokes after all. Vile and disgusting. Disney did right.
@LITTLEONE: no,he didn’t.
The link was to a girl’s choir singing “I touch myself”. It was one of those things we call…a joke.
Paddy you might consider it a joke. I would consider it what it seems it was.
He shared a CP-ish video of pubescent girls alongside an equally disgusting caption by a man who was later convicted for possession of CP.
The Huff Post or Slate will be along soon with an article to defend Pedos using the “Joke” pass.
@LITTLEONE: so your outrage has gone from “he posted cp” to he posted something that could be considered it… probably…maybe!
@LITTLEONE: I’m fairly sure that if he tweeted CP he’d have more to worry about than losing a job…such as the cops knocking at his door.
Some of the tweets he is getting called a pedo over are actually retweets of other people saying it. I smh
Bet it’s was someone from DC
A ffs this is getting really stupid now
Weird that Cernovich did this , he often made sick rape jokes on twitter and they are all re surfacing now of course.
have your say