The biggest comic-book story of the weekend didn’t happen at Comic-Con. It went down late Friday afternoon, after Disney summarily fired James Gunn from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise (he was working on the script for Vol. 3) after old tweets containing insensitive and offensive jokes were resurfaced and circulated online.

The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe is still reeling from the news. Guardians Vol. 3 was one of only two productions confirmed for the post-Avengers 4 MCU. (Spider-Man: Far From Home was the other, and that’s not even technically a Marvel movie.) It throws a lot of plans into chaos. And the Guardians cast seems to be rocked by the news as well. Here’s how they’ve responded so far. Chris Pratt quoted from the Bible...

Zoe Saldana called it a “challenging weekend” and said she would “take everything in” before further comment:

Dave Bautista, who really owes a lot of his acting to Gunn for taking a chance on him as Drax in the first Guardians when he was still widely known as a former pro wrestler, wasn’t nearly as circumspect in his comments, declaring he was “NOT ok” with his firing:

And Sean Gunn, who plays Kraglin and also doubles for Rocket Raccoon and Groot on set (and also happens to be James Gunn’s brother) posted a long thread about the news, saying how he is “quite proud of how kind, generous, and compassionate he is”

It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Disney could reverse itself. (MSNBC fired and then rehired contributor Sam Seder after an old rape joke he had made on Twitter was discovered by Mike Cernovich, the same social media agitator who shared Gunn’s tweets.) But if Gunn really is gone for good, Marvel needs to find a new director to helm the Guardians series, and quickly. Thanos’ finger snap probably won’t keep them dead for too much longer.

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