Apparently Disney has fired James Gunn over some edgelord tweets from a decade ago. I can understand Disney's actions since they aggressively quarantine any kind of threat to their "family friendly" brand, though I imagine Guardians 3 will suffer because of it.

I don't think there's any real doubt that he was making a bad attempt at being a provocateur, but given the highly granular history the Internet provides he's now suffering for it. I recently became aware of Twitter accounts which automatically post deleted tweets from blue tick users, so likely if he wanted to silently delete his ill-considered attempts at humour it would have Streisanded the whole thing. I think it's a pity that the Internet acts to prevent people from making mistakes without having to hear about them decades later.

Articles:

https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/20/guardians-of-the-galaxy-james-gunn-fired

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44906019

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/james-gunn-fired-guardians-of-the-galaxy-3-disney-twitter-avengers-dave-bautista-a8457711.html

Normally, I'd find this sort of thing an overreaction, but...
I heard about this yesterday before he was fired. It's not just a few Tweets, it's far more than that...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzFSag_6Z3A

It's hard to take the director's side in this. This does not look very cherry-picked. Judge for yourself...

Twitter seems quite harmful for people's careers, lately.

No kidding. Glad I left years ago.

Oh good. Great. We really lacked some overblown twitter drama around here.

STOP IT

Just STOP IT

Family friendly in Disneys viewpoint is having an all white cast of a wife a boy and a girl and a dog and talking with them about the weather all day long.

That's certainly been historically true, and that criticism mostly still holds. It's apparent they've been at least trying to broaden their scope though.

I had no clue he was involved in these.

I STILL remember the first time I watched Toxic Avenger. I think it was on late night during one of my sleepovers as a kid. We were like "What the heck IS this? Is this real?"

Guy was a good director I'm a fan of his work. Sucks for him. I'm not going to read the tweets because I don't twit - I hope whatever he said was more dark / evil humor and not "I'm a card carrying NAMBLA member who thinks little boys are made for molesting."

We're entering an interesting age of 'scripta manent'. Every little edgy, provocative or juvenile thing that one used to simply utter to friends in now written, publicized and remembered. People behave the same as ever, but time doesn't. Every word in the wind is now an intemporal cloud around you. The reality is that, in a life's time, you become several different people (hopefully). The current trendy medias of expression do not allow that. So yeah, good luck, on the long term, to social media users. The former generation didn't have this issue, the latter one probably won'^t have it after having witnessed its effects. But right know, many people are stuck for good in the jaws of this idiocy. Idiocies from the past authors (and sometimes simply idiotic because expressed on a broad decontextualizing media), and idiocies of the current readers (who'll re-attach any old markings to current people's identities).

So yeap. Litlle roll-eying grin there. A small, awkward, techno-cultural moment that society will have to crawl through.

In normal circumstances I think 10 year old horrible jokes wouldn't and shouldn't get you fired, but since it's Disney I think you have to take the punch and accept it. No company is more focused on crowd-pleasing family entertainment dollars.

Hooray for social (let's make up a new controversy) media! Ugh.