Here comes the backlash to the backlash.
Thousands have signed
an online petition for the Walt Disney Co. to rehire
Guardians of the Galaxy writer and director James Gunn after he was fired from the third film in the series Friday.
Gunn had been targeted for criticism by figures connected to a far-right fringe movement, who began highlighting a series of offensive shock-jokes Gunn made, some more than a decade old, on Twitter and his blog.
Fellow director Joe Carnahan (
The Grey,
Smokin’ Aces) shared the petition on Twitter, where it had collected more than 5,000 signatures as of Saturday afternoon.
Gunn has lately used his social media platform to deliver scathing criticism of Donald Trump, which apparently captured the attention of controversial right-wing activist Mike Cernovich, who encouraged his followers to bombard Disney and Marvel accounts with screenshots of perverse jokes about molestation and other taboo subjects that Gunn had made over the years.
Disney responded within hours by
announcing it had fired Gunn.
“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,” Walt Disney Company Chairman Alan Horn said in a statement Friday afternoon.
Most of the tweets have since been deleted, and most can’t be reprinted here, but Cernovich and his followers posted screenshotsof the bad-taste jokes, such as, “Laughter is the best medicine. That’s why I laugh at people with AIDS.”
Gunn had also joked about directing a movie version of the beloved children’s book The Giving Tree in which the tree performs a sex act on its human companion.
