You may recall that back in July 2018, following a Twitter battle with a Right-Wing Fundamentalist, some old tweets that James Gunn wrote back in 2008, and which were of very poor taste, resurfaced which resulted in him being fired from directing the third volume of the franchise that took every marvel fan by storm and brought Marvel and Disney some well-deserved yet somewhat unexpected success. The firing shocked everyone and many petitions were created as a mean to persuade Disney to change their minds, one of which exceeds 429,000 signatures at the time of writing this. I wrote my own take on it back then but for a long time it seemed Disney would not relent despite the outpouring of support for Gunn. Today, it seems they finally gave in.
Deadline reports in an exclusive article that they have obtained confirmation that Disney has decided to rehire James Gunn to helm Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3. Read more at the link below:
Disney had already confirmed that they would still use his script that he had submitted to Marvel before the controversy unleashed, something Dave Bautista, Drax the Destroyer in the movies, openly set as a condition for him to fulfil his contract on the movie. Over the past few months many directors names were thrown about as a potential replacement and every time each one turned down the possibility of accepting the job were it offered to them. That included Taikia Waititi, the director of Thor Ragnarok.
Today’s announcement was confirmed by Gunn himself who had been essentially completely absent from Twitter since the firing where he had once been a daily critic of the current American administration.
— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) March 15, 2019
In all fairness, it had reached a point where Disney was facing the choice of either Re-hiring Gunn or scrap GotG vol 3 altogether, which given that it’s pretty much set to be another success, would have been foolish of them.
So I am very pleased that Gunn is back on the Marvel train. However while Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 was originally scheduled to be released in the summer of 2020, it will still have to be postponed as Gunn is now committed to helm Suicide Squad 2 before production on Guardians 3 can begin. Hopefully that means it will be no later than 2021 before we can all finally see it.