This is the first time I'm writing about #metoo, the sudden surge of complaints by women and even men who have been victims of sexual assault or harassment in Hollywood by men in positions of power, because as important as it may be, I never felt particularly qualified to say anything, nor did it really affect "my corner" of pop culture, given that even before he was exposed as a monster, I always thought Harvey Weinstein was as Oscar-baiting, self-aggrandizing blowhard. Arguably, John Lasseter's departure from Disney as a result of, among other things, "unwanted hugs" was something that affected movies that I care about, but honestly, that seemed pretty clear cut; there were allegations of impropriety which were presumably investigated, and they were dealt with swiftly.
On its face, Disney's decision to drop the axe on Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn for a series of offensive tweets regarding rape and pedophilia looks equally straightforward. I've seen screen captures of some of the tweets, and they are not only offensive, but they are distinctly unfunny, despite Gunn's professed intention to post them as some of shocking humor. Absolutely nobody has defended or attempted to justify the tweets themselves.
My problem is that they were already out there when Disney hired Gunn; the newest tweet came out five years before the first Guardians movie did. These things were on the internet, and if they were easy enough for a gaggle of Trump apologists to find, I'm sure Disney's crack team of background investigators could easily have found them as well, and yet for all of that, Gunn went and made two movies for them.
The long and the short of what I'm saying is that if Gunn's proclivities had really mattered to Disney from the very beginning, then they never would have hired him because the evidence of what kind of person he supposedly is was already out there for everyone to see. Apart from his tweets, the over-the-top humor in his films, like the somewhat brutal Super, should have been the biggest of red flags. Gunn is no Roseanne Barr; their reaction to her blatantly racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett was perfectly timed and measured.
However, had that tweet been ten years old, and had they hired Roseanne with that tweet out there, only to fire her when someone brought it up, then there would have been a bit of a problem. That, to my mind, is what's happened with Gunn. They knew, or were entirely in a position to know everything about his past when they hired him, but went and decided to make one and a half billion dollars with him at the global box office anyway.
In short, Disney deserves scorn, rather than praise, for firing Gunn as a knee-jerk reaction to decade-old tweets that they had probably already known about long before the spotlight was shone upon them again. I'm not saying Gunn's hands are clean, but by no means are Disney's either.
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