How James Gunn was fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (and how he came back)

Next week, Marvel Studios will premiere its new movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,  the final movie James Gunn will ever direct for the studio. After this, he’ll likely settle into his role as the architect of the new DC Universe, which includes writing and directing a new Superman movie.

Marvel has been going through a bit of a rough patch lately, with new films not quite hitting the highs of the old. There’s a lot of pressure on Guardians 3 to perform well. “Every release we have means everything to us,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told The Hollywood Reporter. “We still are the people that remember when we only had one or two movies a year where we just put all our chips in. That’s what every film is for us. And this in particular is extra emotional because of the journey with James.”

What was “the journey with James”? It’s a long story. It started in 2018, when James Gunn was in the midst of pre-production for Guardians 3. Always a prolific tweeter, Gunn sent out some tweets that got under the skins of some very unpleasant people. “I got to a place where I was very frustrated with one specific thing that was happening in the world, and I started speaking out and that got me fired, but I also think that I did the right thing [speaking out],” Gunn recalled. “When either somebody’s just making stuff up to get clicks or somebody is just lying to somebody to make them look like an idiot, yeah, I’m going to say something,” he says.

Gunn doesn’t mention the specific tweet that started things rolling, but it probably involved him speaking out against the policies of then-president Donald Trump, which got noticed by conspiracy theorist and alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich. Cernovich dug up some tasteless tweets Gunn had made in the past. (One from 2009 read: “The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped and it’s like ‘whew this feels great, not being raped!’“) Gunn had since apologized for those tweets, but they’re not the kind of thing a family-friendly company like Disney wants someone working for them to have said. Alan Horn, then the president of Walt Disney Studios, made the decision to fire Gunn, calling the tweets “indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values.”

Chris Pratt when he heard James Gunn was getting fired: “Jesus f**king Christ, don’t do it”

By this point Gunn had become a staple director in the MCU, so his firing was a big deal. Marvel Studios co-president Louis D’Esposito called Chris Pratt, who plays Star-Lord in the Guardians movies, to break the news. “Louis, don’t do it,” Pratt remembered saying. “Jesus fucking Christ, don’t do it.”

Pratt’s reaction was pretty typical of the cast. Pratt got to work on an open letter in support of Gunn signed by the whole cast. Dave Bautista, who plays Drax, was more direct, tweeting that it was “Nauseating to work for someone who’d empower a smear campaign by fascists.”

“Dave and Chris are so different in their approaches,” Gunn said, looking back. “Chris is like, ‘How do we do this methodically and take it one step at a time?’ Dave is like, ‘Fuck you.’“

But however they did, all the cast members had Gunn’s back. “This was a man who took chances on us, and it just made sense for us to have his back when he needed it the most,” said Zoe Saldaña, who plays Gamora.

There and back again: How James Gunn returned to Disney

Among producers, too, there seemed to be a sense that the firing wasn’t quite the right move, and hope that Gunn would eventually return. Marvel never even met with a director to replace him on Guardians 3. “We didn’t even put a preliminary list together just because we couldn’t do it,” recalled Feige. “We couldn’t stomach it.”

Production moved forward on that movie, but they were still using Gunn’s script, which made Pratt think he would be back sooner or later. “I was like, ‘Oh, so we can use the script written by James Gunn, but we just can’t have him direct?’” he said. “The script is so good that you’re going to be like, ‘Yeah, we had to get rid of him because we couldn’t associate with that man. But we will make his script.’“

In the end, Alan Horn ended up reversing the decision he made and rehired Gunn. “Everything he did subsequently was first class,” Horn said. “He was such a gentleman about it in the ensuing months that we just brought him back. It felt like the right thing to do. I hold him in absolute high regard.” In the meanwhile, Gunn had signed up to work with Warner Bros. on DC movies, but Feige was fine with that. He’s negotiated that transition remarkably smoothly.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the end (mostly)

All that brings us to Guardians 3, which is out next Friday, May 5. Bautista and Saldaña have both said this is the last time they plan to play these characters, and although the series may continue with a new set of Guardians, this definitely feels like the end of an era, particularly with Gunn leaving. He even had some issues with how the Guardians were depicted in the Avengers movies under directors Joe and Anthony Russo, so we can only imagine how he’d feel about them going on all-new adventures now that he’s working exclusively with another studio. (For the record, Gunn thinks Star-Lord would have killed Gamora if she’d asked him to, and he doesn’t think he would have punched Thanos and doomed the universe.)

Likewise, the actors have a hard time imagining themselves working for a new director. “I can’t imagine playing Mantis with someone else writing the words,” said Pom Klementieff. She even reached out to Gunn for advice on how to play Mantis in the Avengers movies. “I was being given directions, and I was like, ‘I think I’m going to call James.’”

Hopefully this close-knit energy propels Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to success. “I’ve done jobs where I’ve been so close to people, then the job ends and I just never see them again,” Pratt said. “I don’t think that’ll happen with us.”

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