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James Gunn Has Given His First Interview About Being Fired and Rehired By Disney

If you’re anything like me, after Disney reversed course on its very bad decision to fire James Gunn, you really wanted to know what the hell happened. Gunn kept his head down, stayed silent and even took a job doing Suicide Squad 2 for the Distinguished Competition, which probably gave Disney the room to hire him back, but it still left us without the details of what happened.

But now Gunn has given an interview to Deadline and he let us in on all the behind-the-scenes drama.

That first day… I’m going to say it was the most intense of my entire life. There have been other difficult days in my life, from the time I got sober when I was younger, to the death of friends who committed suicide. But this was incredibly intense. It happened, and suddenly it seemed like everything was gone. I just knew, in a moment that happened incredibly quickly, I had been fired. It felt as if my career was over.

Yeah, it was really crazy. I feel like if anyone at Disney had actually slowed down for a minute the outrage would have blown over and they could have gotten the movie out on schedule. I mean, has anyone made good on their boycott threats over Gunn’s jokes? Avengers: Endgame is the first Marvel movie released since Gunn was hired back and that has been raking in money hand over fist all over the world.

It doesn’t hurt that everyone in the world who isn’t a total moron dickbag wanted Gunn back.

And then came this outpouring of real love. From my girlfriend Jen; my producer and my agents; Chris Pratt calling me and freaking out; Zoe Saldana and Karen Gillan, all calling and crying. Sylvester Stallone FaceTime-ing me. And, of course, Dave Bautista, who came out so strong. That amount of love that I felt from my friends, my family, and the people in the community was absolutely overwhelming.

This is actually kind of heartwarming.

The studios, for the most part, said, “We’d love to have you.” They called within the first two days. But I didn’t believe it. That’s the thing that I have to be honest about. On some theoretical level, I was like, “Well, maybe I do have a future.”

All of Marvel’s movies are modeled after Guardians of the Galaxy now. All of them. The biggest movie franchise in the history of the world has one mode, and that mode is “do what James Gunn did” so of course studios were beating his door down the second he was a free agent.

I just hope people are as kind to me when someone finds all the dumb s**t I say on this website and gets me fired from whatever job I’m doing.

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