You apparently can un-fire a Gunn

Age of the Geek Column: Well, didn't see that coming.
News broke last week that Disney has re-hired James Gunn to direct "Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3" after abruptly giving him the boot last July.
On the surface, Gunn was fired due to a series of tweets that, to put lightly, landed on the darker side of the humor spectrum. However, what was unusual about the situation was that the tweets were made in 2008 and 2009. While definitely not a good match for Disney's family friendly persona, they were in-line with Gunn's career at the time. Gunn didn't break into Hollywood by making kid-friendly fun for the whole family. He dealt in shock humor, professionally. As many do.
Disney didn't seem to have a problem with this in 2014 when Gunn released the first "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie, nor was it an issue in 2017 when "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" came out.
So what happened in 2018 that made these tweets such a problem?
To put it simply, Roseanne Barr happened.
In May of 2018, Barr unleashed a racist Twitter rant towards former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, because apparently Barr thought that the most appropriate way to criticize Jarrett for working on the Iran Nuclear Deal was to compare her to an ape.
As it turns out, that's not really the best career move when your paychecks are being signed by Disney. Barr's tweets nearly got her revival of "Roseanne" completely shut down, but Barr fell on her sword and left, allowing the show to continue, rebranded as "The Conners."
So what does this have to do with James Gunn? Well, Roseanne Barr is a vocal Trump supporter on Twitter and James Gunn is a vocal Trump critic.
When Barr was sacked for tweeting out horrible things while working for Disney, right-wing agitators demanded tit-for-tat retribution, digging through a decade worth of tweets to find something they could make a stink about. And make a stink they did.
And, unfortunately, it worked. Because if the right is good at anything, it's false equivalency and if the left is good at anything, it's eating their own.
The hypocrisy of Disney's reactionary decision was stunning. Firing Gunn from working on the Marvel Cinematic Universe for offensive tweets made years before they hired him is quite the move considering Disney had just put out yet another billion dollar movie starring a convicted felon.
Which is not a dig on Robert Downey Jr. in any way. Disney didn't hire Downey in 2001 during that particular low period of the actor's life, they hired him in 2008 after he'd cleaned up. That's how it's supposed to work.
In a few years, if Roseanne Barr manages to dial down the conspiracy theories and stop blaming her circumstances on everything from Ambien to Michelle Obama, maybe she'll get another chance at a comeback too.
In Gunn's case, firing him for making offensive jokes while representing the House of Mouse would be understandable, but retroactively giving him the boot never passed the smell test.
Fortunately, while Gunn himself quietly and politely accepted his fate, walking across the bridge without burning it, Gunn's crew largely stood by their director and called out Disney's blunder on his behalf. Most notably Dave Bautista, who spent a month putting Disney on blast for the decision, going so far as to question whether he wanted to return to the role of Drax the Destroyer for "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3."
Gunn, meanwhile, seemingly wasted no time securing another gig. While Disney scrambled to figure out what they were going to do with Guardians 3, Gunn quietly got a gig with the distinguished competition, signing on with Warner Bros. to direct "Suicide Squad 2."
So I guess all's well that ends well.
Disney's walkback undoes the dangerous precedent they set and now audiences get two James Gunn movies about criminal misfits working together to save the day set to a killer soundtrack.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and expects to see Dave Bautista in every movie James Gunn makes from now until the end of time, because he earned it.