James Gunn Fired From GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 3 After Past Tweets Are Dredged Up

One of the biggest stories likely making buzz on the San Diego Comic Con floor doesn’t involve a film spoiler or comic book announcement. It most likely is about James Gunn.

Gunn has been fired by Disney after long-deleted, decade-old Tweets about rape and pedophilia resurfaced.

The brouhaha all started when right-wing opponents to the vociferously liberal Gunn began providing screencaps of the long deleted Tweets in order to silence him. Here is a brief sampling of the Tweets, as curated by The Wrap:

“Expendables is so manly I f—ed the s— out of the p-ssy boy next to me,” he wrote in one.
“The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped and it’s like ‘whew this feels great, not being raped!’” read a tweet from February 2009.
“I remember my first NAMBLA meeting. It was the first time I felt ok being who I am,” said another, referring to a notorious group for pedophiles.
And in a tweet from 2011, he teased fans, “I’m doing a big Hollywood film adaptation of The Giving Tree with a happy ending — the tree grows back and gives the kid a b—job.”

This led to his being fired by Disney, with this statement from studio chairman Alan Horn:

“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.”

Of course, if Alan Horn is just “discovering” these “attitudes,” then he is pretty bad at his job, because it is old news. Way back in 2012, shortly after Gunn was hired as Guardians of the Galaxy director, a post on his blog with similar homophobia and misogynistic language was discovered, which led to a petition to Marvel Studios for his removal from the film. I wrote about it back then.  Since Marvel Studios were part of Disney at the time, Horn and the Disney brass should have known about it. But they let him make two films that earned over $773 million and $863 million worldwide without losing sleep over it.  So forgive me if Disney’s current bout of conscience rings hallow.

More on this as it develops.