#WTF: There's A Petition To Rehire 'Guardians' Director After His 'Rape Jokes' Surface

Fans of Guardians director have started a petition that has more than 150,000 signatures in a little over 24 hours.

Filmmaker James Gunn found himself in a fix after some of his irresponsible tweets from the past resulted in Disney firing him from the next instalment of the Guardians movie. And as the actors of the film are still making up their mind about the situation, the fans have overwhelmingly come out in Gunn’s defence, asserting that Gunn should not be held responsible for what he tweeted a decade back.

One of the main individuals in Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe and behind summer blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War, Gunn apparently made a few upsetting ‘jokes’ about paedophilia and molestation on Twitter when the social media platform was still in its infancy. The director gave out an explanation on Twitter saying, he made those jokes viewing himself as a ‘provocateur’ and that he had since ‘developed as a person, and so had his work and his sense of humour’.

The account responsible for digging out Gunn’s screenshots is of conspiracy theorist and alt-right beacon Mike Cernovich, who is best-known for the Pizzagate controversy leading up to the 2016 US presidential elections. Cernovich dug out Gunn’s past tweets as a response to Gunn schooling him.

Realising this, many fans of the director and the franchise set up a petition that has more than 150,000 signatures in a little over 24 hours. The petition asks Disney to rehire Gunn as the director of the series and to ‘realise’ their ‘mistake’ of accommodating a man’s views from over a decade earlier. Also, the complainant being a known troublemaker from before is why some feel that Gunn’s firing is starting to feel like systematic targeting than bringing someone to justice.

Gunn also said in his tweets that his “days of saying something just because it’s shocking and trying to get a reaction are over.” Whether Disney pays any attention to this overwhelming support for the director or sticks to its ‘Gunns’, is something we’ll find out in the weeks to come.

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