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Disney fires James Gunn from "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"

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There might not be a shitstorm if they hire him a second time down the line. Only reason their was one this time was because of 2 trolls scared them. We don't know what the political climate will be like in the future. Plus he will no doubt make another movie in between and if that movie makes money it just proves they didn't need to fire him to begin with because that is their only concern. Loosing money.

Jason
 
There might not be a shitstorm if they hire him a second time down the line. Only reason their was one this time was because of 2 trolls scared them. We don't know what the political climate will be like in the future. Plus he will no doubt make another movie in between and if that movie makes money it just proves they didn't need to fire him to begin with because that is their only concern. Loosing money.

Jason

No one was talking about down the line. If they go back on their firing *now*, there will be a shitstorm. And it won't matter what movie he's working on.
 
I was under the impression that they would bring him back for Guardians but they would simply hire him again in a few years. I guess one could argue that by the time production started on this new movie he would basically be hired for would still be years away from being made and thus even though under contract the buzz of the issue would die down by the time they get around to making this next movie. People might be mad at first but I doubt anyone even if they did hire him back now would stay fixated on this one issue for years. Eventually people would just move on. It's not like they will not go see Captain Marvel or Avengers 4 or Spiderman or Black Panther or anything that would come out before this future Gunn movie is made. If anything it might help Guardians 3 get a pass. Gunn still gets to make more movies which pleases people who doesn't think he should have been fired plus it sticks it to those 2 trolls abit. Maybe they use his script yet people are satisfied that he doesn't get to direct it which is seen as just punishment. Basically everyone wins but also looses just a little by making a compromise.

Jason
 
Maybe but what about J.J Abrams? He has done Trek and Wars. People usually consider him a better big picture guy than as a actually director or writer. Plus he is already working for Disney.

Jason
 
Well, Abrams contribution to Star Trek is controversial, his shows plots are of controversial quality (Lost), and he isn't a noted "space opera" guy, just a guy who happens to have done space opera. I don't know why his name is brought up all the time for everything; he hasn't demonstrated he is a savant or genius the way others have.

Marvel wanted someone to act as an overseer for space-based stories, maybe manage the different empires and factions.

The Kree Empire, The Skrull Empire, The Badoon Empire, The Shi'Ar Empire, The Brood, maybe Galactus, Thanos, Annihilus, Nova, Adam Warlock, Silver Surfer, etc.

Can you think of anyone better qualified for that than the guy who ran Babylon 5, perhaps the most notably epic plot in TV history? A guy who additionally already writes for Marvel, like Joss Whedon had done? He already guest appeared in Thor 1. B5 is a monument to plot. Lost is a monument to dragging absolutely no plot out across 6 seasons.

A writer from Farscape or Stargate SG-1 maybe? GOTG is already noted as being similar to Farscape, to the point they got Ben Browder to guest star. But either way, it seems like a role made for prominent space opera writers.

Directing GOTG3 is another story.
 
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The thread is 44 pages deep. I am quite sure everyone has talked about the issue beyond the question of how this effects the quality of the future movie. I am sure I have also talked about how I think forgiveness is important and the trolling that caused the issue to become a issue. Heck we have even talked about the nature of dark humor though some of that might also have been in the,PC off the rails thread. For awhile their both threads felt kind of the same. It's hard to sometimes keep track of what one said in one thread as opposed to another one.

Jason

Some talked about the issue. Others entered this thread breathlessly trying to find ways to guarantee another GOTG movie is produced without as much as a sentence specifically about the subject--Gunn and his so-called humor.

\Holy fucking shit dude, overreact much. All he did was make a few bad jokes, yes they were disgusting, but it was not even close to "horrifying" or "inexcusable". He's not Howard Weistein, or Roman Polanski.

Still not getting it. The fact the man made more than "a few bad jokes" about pedophilia and rape speaks to a larger problem. As I've said before, what kind of person (Gunn) actually believed there's anything right about "joking" about rape and pedophilia? He was a damned adult--a fully aware adult, not some thoughtless teenager stereotype trying to impress his friends online. "I'm sorry" does not hand wave his conscious dive into that away.

Further, if a part of this culture believes Joy Reid should still be held accountable for her years-old homophobic posts (well, a culture other than that running MSNBC) and Trump for his old Access Hollywood miked "grab" comment, then it should apply to Gunn.
 
It may not wave it away, perhaps actually being sorry should afford him some degree of leniency though, the apologies he made before this even became a shitstorm seem genuine. I don't think Disney should rehire him, as that would make matters worse for him if anything, and I understand that DIsney don't want their name associated with remarks like those. But perhaps his career doesn't need to be destroyed.

Trump on the other hand was not making a gross joke or trying to shock or offend anyone, he was showing off to a friend about having actually sexually assaulted women and got away with it. Not the same.
 
The Kree Empire, The Skrull Empire, The Badoon Empire, The Shi'Ar Empire, The Brood, maybe Galactus, Thanos, Annihilus, Nova, Adam Warlock, Silver Surfer, etc.
It's the Badoon Brotherhood, mind you ;)
 
I'm a person who absolutely believes in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of humour. But I can absolutely understand why Disney fired him, as a business decision. I totally sympathise with their position.

Disney has a reputation built on (cinematic) moralism. When George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney, he did it partly because he apparently felt Disney's reputation for upholding societal moral values would mean they would keep the moral heart of Star Wars intact, in a way other studios may not. With a reputation built on restating moral values for every new generation, what would your company do if it emerged one of your prominent employees joked on a public platform about sticking his cock in babies? No matter how good the man.

The company of Snow White and Pinocchio, who are making a universally-appealing comic book franchise that will be sold in markets across the planet, including conservative markets in Asia or Africa, can't exactly treat it the same way as as the company making The Fast and the Furious.

Freedom of speech also entails your peers are free to be judge you for what you say, form their own opinions, and have a right to refuse you work. I don't believe he meant it. I don't believe anyone with a kind reputation could. I don't believe his career should suffer permanently for a joke. But Disney are free to refuse him employment. He will just have to find work elsewhere, and many studios will be happy to employ him, as he is not a Harvey Weinstein or a Kevin Spacey, he just made a mistake, and others do not require Disney's reputation for child-friendliness.

Maybe if Gunn donated all of his earnings to a children's charity or some other huge act of contrition, Disney could diplomatically justify his re-appointment as director, because forgiveness is also a treasured societal value in the west. But I'm not sure Gunn is such a huge loss for them anyway, as the Marvel Universe is bigger than any one man, and as good as GOTG was, there have been better science fiction movies.
 
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Disney has a reputation built on (cinematic) moralism. When George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney, he did it partly because he apparently felt Disney's reputation for upholding societal moral values would mean they would keep the moral heart of Star Wars intact, in a way other studios may not. With a reputation built on restating moral values for every new generation, what would your company do if it emerged one of your prominent employees joked on a public platform about sticking his cock in babies? No matter how good the man.

I'm sorry, but did Disney ever make official apoligies for all the horrid racist cartoons they made in the past? Did they ever come out and say that what their company did in the past was wrong? What moral values? Disney actually loves to exploit the looks of young girls on tv, and later puts them on the music stage in skimpy outfits to make more money.

There is NO moral heart anywhere in The Mouse's body. Just cold, heart, business understanding. They never said 'we don't like Gunn's chosen words back then'. They said 'we realize other people hate it, and we will cut off this part of us to make it look like we do'. Don't mix those two up. Disney's about $$$, and keeping Gunn would cut into their image of wholesome family fun, so they cut it away, just like that. Image, not moral.
 
Maybe but what about J.J Abrams? He has done Trek and Wars. People usually consider him a better big picture guy than as a actually director or writer. Plus he is already working for Disney.

Jason

Abrams is horrible at worldbuilding and creating a setting, he only cares about the spectacle. He'd be awful at building and maintaining the MCU's fledging space storylines.
 
If Gunn is no longer Marvel's "space tsar" for phase 4.....

.....how about J Michael Straczynski oversees space?

I don't think he'd fit in well within Disney. Disney has a game plan with the MCU, i believe they already planned out the entire new MCU including main villain after Avengers 4 is done and they move on with a whole batch of new heroes.

JMS has a reputation in the SF community because of B5 where he had near complete creative comtrol and was able to tell his story as showrunner. I don't think Disney/Marvel is giving their directors this kind of freedom. Directors need to keep their story and style in service to the big picture and i don't believe JMS would be a good choice for it.

Maybe but what about J.J Abrams? He has done Trek and Wars. People usually consider him a better big picture guy than as a actually director or writer. Plus he is already working for Disney.

Jason

Abrams has done some very entertaining Trek movies, that were perfect summer blockbuster. Of course they only had character and ship names in common with Old Trek and were a completely different animal (which is why some Old Trek fans would like to burn him at the stake) but i believe Abrams would fit well in the MCU movies as that is their template.

Give Abrams some good writers and let him go and you might get something quite good. With Star Wars Disney has simply dropped the ball by letting Abrams do A New Hope 2.0 but MCU seems to be under better leadership.
 
Give Abrams some good writers and let him go and you might get something quite good. With Star Wars Disney has simply dropped the ball by letting Abrams do A New Hope 2.0 but MCU seems to be under better leadership.

This is a thread about Gunn and not the new Star Wars, but I can't blame Disney too much for letting Abrams reset everything...there were a LOT of problems with the simple idea of new Star Wars movies right from the time Disney announced them. They were in a bad position that Lucas had screwed things up by mismanaging things for years that a reset was probably their best option.

But Abrams would be bad news to take over as the architect for a larger setting, he's not a "full story" guy. He never thinks things out, he goes for onetime spectacle stuff.
 
Just cold, heart, business understanding.

Hence why I couched the post in language like "business decision". Their company may have discovered a decades-old niche, in which they make money by having the image of a moral guardian, but we all know what the priorities of a business are.

Irrelevant of whether you think they live up to it, that is the reasoning of their decision. It's why my colleague takes her young daughters to see every Disney film, and why kids seem to have some fascination with dressing as Disney princesses.

But since you brought it up:

Say if someone involved in a Jewish history film had made a past joke on Twitter that the Holocaust was good fun, the SS were cool, and had been fired, would you question the past ethics of the company? Or would you see there might be a conflict of interest in allowing that person, no matter how nice, to remain on that film? Irrelevant of my feelings on the issue, Disney is a kid's company, who would have been employing someone who joked about raping kids. Hence why I said I sympathise, because there is no right answer here, a case can be made for either decision, because many people feel that doing nothing would be making light of a serious issue. But remember he has not been made a pariah like genuine criminals such as Weinstein. Life is complicated, and sometimes people who don't deserve to, can end up on the wrong side of poorly chosen words or choices, without any party being at fault.

I'm not sure what I would have done, probably kept Gunn if I had known him to be a good person. But I'm not a children's entertainer, so I can afford to be idealistic. Disney employs thousands and might not be so uninhibited. Maybe Disney isn't either an ogre, or a angel, but just a complex collection of conflicting people with conflicting motives?
 
Hence why I couched the post in language like "business decision". Their company may have discovered a decades-old niche, in which they make money by having the image of a moral guardian, but we all know what the priorities of a business are.

Irrelevant of whether you think they live up to it, that is the reasoning of their decision. It's why my colleague takes her young daughters to see every Disney film, and why kids seem to have some fascination with dressing as Disney princesses.

But since you brought it up:

Say if someone involved in a Jewish history film had made a past joke on Twitter that the Holocaust was good fun, the SS were cool, and had been fired, would you question the past ethics of the company? Or would you see there might be a conflict of interest in allowing that person, no matter how nice, to remain on that film? Irrelevant of my feelings on the issue, Disney is a kid's company, who would have been employing someone who joked about raping kids. Hence why I said I sympathise, because there is no right answer here, a case can be made for either decision, because many people feel that doing nothing would be making light of a serious issue. But remember he has not been made a pariah like genuine criminals such as Weinstein. Life is complicated, and sometimes people who don't deserve to, can end up on the wrong side of poorly chosen words or choices, without any party being at fault.

I'm not sure what I would have done, probably kept Gunn if I had known him to be a good person. But I'm not a children's entertainer, so I can afford to be idealistic. Disney employs thousands and might not be so uninhibited. Maybe Disney isn't either an ogre, or a angel, but just a complex collection of conflicting people with conflicting motives?

Those are excellent points, no doubt. However, I'm not going to answer them, because I stated earlier, I'm keeping my thoughts on the subject Gunn all to myself. No matter what I feel or say, the other side of it will attack me like I'm the worst. That's what usually happens in discussions online, in my experience. I only commented on your post because I really don't think there's anything moral about Disney. I wanted to adres that, because some people say that what Disney did was the right thing to do. Without agreeing or disagreeing with that, 'the right thing' wasn't part of their thought proces, never. It was about realizing they could loose money from this.
 
Hollywood scandals are certainly an interesting and understandably controversial subject since the outcomes are often so extreme one way or the other - you could think misbehavior isn't so bad that the offender should never work in film/TV again but at the same time it is bad enough that they should not get millions of dollars for doing more work.

I think offensive humor has its place and some value but the frequency of Gunn's pedophile-identifying or trivializing comments do seem particularly creepy and maybe personal and probably not ideal for him to continue in a very all-ages franchise.
 
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