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In 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had one of its biggest shake-ups up to that point, but this shakeup didn’t play out onscreen - it happened behind the scenes. Inappropriate social media posts from James Gunn’s past had been re-shared by right wing activists online in an attempt to put Marvel Studios under pressure to disassociate themselves from the director in the wake of his criticism of the then-current administration. Gunn had previously written and directed Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, giving Marvel some big wins at the box office, and at the time Gunn had recently finished the script for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, but the backlash from his tweets caused Marvel to reconsider their relationship with the director. Gunn was dropped, with Walt Disney Company chairman Alan Horn saying in a statement that Gunn's 10-year-old tweets were "indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values," describing their business relationship as "severed." 

“I remember it all very clearly,” Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt says during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I remember talking to Lou D’Esposito at Marvel. I don’t think Lou would mind me saying this, but he goes, ‘We’ve got to let him go. And I was like, ‘You’re making a mistake. You are making a mistake. You can’t. No, you can’t.’ He’s like, ‘Dude, it has to happen.’ And then it happened. And I reached out to James. I was like, ‘Dude, this is not over. This is not over.’ And I started at that point praying on it and strategizing.”

Pratt and his Guardians of the Galaxy castmates lobbied for Gunn’s return. Pratt recalls how Dave Bautista loudly beat the drum on their friend’s behalf.

“Bautista met it the way only he can, which is like, he’s a defender, you know what I mean? At the end of the day the credit for him coming back I think belongs to the folks at Marvel and Alan Horn at Disney, because I think he just woke up one day and was like, this is not right. And I think there are certain people who do things that get them canceled and then they behave in a way directly after that affirms that choice. I think James was incredibly classy the entire time. He owned it and from the outside, once the smoke settled and the dust settled and you looked at that situation, you realized that it was truly unfair. So, he just got that job back because it was a glaring mistake to ever fire him for that.”

Gunn wound up returning to Marvel to direct Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which would be his last movie for the studio before beginning his tenure as co-president of DC Studios. However, the writer/director remains close with the Guardians of the Galaxy cast, including Pratt, and has expressed interest in putting them in future DC Studios projects.

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