James Gunn will not appear during Sony’s Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con, a studio insider told TheWrap, after a series of old (now deleted) tweets resurfaced in which the filmmaker made what he admitted were “offensive” jokes about taboo topics like rape and pedophilia.
While the filmmaker’s appearance during the panel was never confirmed by the studio, Gunn had teased on Twitter and Instagram that he would talk about an upcoming horror film he was producing at the studio during Sony’s slot.
Gunn, the writer-director of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise, apologized late Thursday for his previous tweets. “Many people who have followed my career know when I started, I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo,” Gunn wrote in a series of tweets. “As I have discussed publicly many times, as I’ve developed as a person, so has my work and my humor.”
Marvel, the studio that produces the “Guardians” franchise directed by Gunn, is not presenting at San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H this year.
Gunn frequently tweets about his opposition to President Donald Trump, thus drew the ire of fans of the president such as right-wing provocateur Mike Cernovich, who began posting a series of old tweets by Gunn, many subsequently deleted.
Online sleuths then dug up dozens of old tweets of the sort Gunn admitted were “offensive,” many from between 2008 and 2011.
“Expendables is so manly I f-ed the s- out of the p-ssy boy next to me,” he wrote in one.
“The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped and it’s like ‘whew this feels great, not being raped!’” read a tweet from February 2009.
However, Disney, the parent company where the “Guardians” franchise is set up, dropped the filmmaker, saying that the comments were “indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values.”