Star Wars director Rian Johnson deleted more than 1,000 tweets from his account following James Gunn’s firing and has removed more than 20,000 overall. San Diego Comic-Con was overshadowed by the news Gunn was fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after offensive tweets from his past resurfaced. In the aftermath, many Hollywood personalities, including Gunn’s Guardians cast members have voiced their support of the ousted director. Fans have launched a petition for Disney to rehire Gunn, which currently has more than 275,000 signatures.
Johnson was an extremely active Twitter user and often used the platform to interact with fans and fellow creatives. He’s still actively tweeting, but with only 1,300+ tweets remaining on his account, to cut out 20,000 tweets is pretty massive. It’s unclear why Johnson took this action: perhaps prohibitively, wary of trolls posting things he’s said out of context, which is now all the rage. It’s also possible that Disney has issued some sort of directive to their talent about social media post-Gunn situation, suggesting caution or deletion.
At the moment, the motive behind this mass deletion is unknown, but given that 1,038 tweets were removed over the weekend, it’s seemingly in response to Gunn’s termination, which has sparked an absolute storm online. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Marvel director came under fire last week after old posts of his referencing pedophilia and molestation surfaced again. Ultimately, it grew to the point where it was problematic enough that Disney felt some action needed to be taken.
Johnson, on the other hand, isn’t one to shy away from a Twitter battle and even had help fighting his harshest critics when Mission: Impossible – Fallout director, Christopher McQuarrie, called out the aforementioned bigoted Last Jedi fans earlier this month.
