More than 240,000 people seek James Gunn re-hire

More than 240,000 people have signed a petition for Disney to rehire Guardians of the Galaxy franchise director James Gunn, who also garnered celebrity support just days after he was axed over a series of offensive tweets.

“I’m smart enough to know this most likely won’t change anything but hopefully, this could get Disney to realize the mistake they made and not do it again in the future,” said a person named Chandler Edwards, who launched the petition on change. org.

Edwards argued that if Gunn was being punished by being removed from the third installment in the popular series, “you have to do it for all the other directors who have said some crappy joke sometime in their life, which is all of them.”

The tweets, mainly from 2008 and 2011, joked about taboo topics such as rape and pedophilia.

Gunn, 51, has been an outspoken critic of US President Donald Trump and has drawn the ire of conservative critics, who went back through his timeline and dug up the tweets.

After the offensive tweets resurfaced late Thursday, Gunn used the micro-blogging platform to say “I’ve developed as a person, so has my work and my humor” after early years as a “provocateur.”

Gunn described himself as a “very, very different” person than when he wrote the tweets, now focusing on love rather than anger.

The third film in the series is due out in 2020.