‘The Last Jedi’ Director Deletes Several Tweets Following James Gunn Firing (UPDATED)

This article has been updated since its original publication.

The firing of “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn over old pedophile jokes appears to have created a panic in some Hollywood circles that the mob may come for them.

According to ScreenRant, another high-profile Disney employee, “The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson, deleted “several” tweets from his account following Gunn’s firing in line with what he had been doing since early July. Whether this was a deliberate act to hide something unflattering or just a paranoid move to avoid trolls taking a past tweet out of context remains to be seen.

“A YouTube video on the channel John talks Star Wars (hat tip Cosmic Book News) revealed shortly after Gunn’s firing, Johnson deleted over 20,000 tweets,” reports SR. “According to screenshots presented in the video, Johnson at one point had 22.3K tweets, but that number is now down to 1,126.”

Johnson may very well just be cleaning house, but the ugly thing about the internet is that nothing goes away forever and his tweets can easily be obtained by the Wayback Machine, which archives internet pages. If anything, Johnson deleting his tweets will only embolden trolls to dig deep looking for whatever dirt they can find.

With all that said, it is doubtful trolls will find anything. For one thing, Rian Johnson has been active on Twitter for a while and has endured his fair share of trolling following the fan backlash against “The Last Jedi.” If he had anything close to the career-ending tweets like Gunn’s in his account, trolls would probably have uncovered them by now.

Since the massive account overhaul, Johnson has also remained active on Twitter, which indicates he feels confident enough to keep a high profile. Gunn, however, has remained silent since his firing last Friday.

Following the James Gunn fiasco, scrutiny then shifted onto several comedians who had previously used their Twitter accounts to make pedophile jokes. One, in particular, involved “Rick and Morty” creator Dan Harmon, who deleted a satirical video in which he posed as a pedophile raping a baby doll. Harmon has since apologized for the video.

UPDATE: Following the publication of this article, ScreenRant amended their post to say that Johnson had been deleting tweets since early July and included a timeline of those deletions. The outlet also changed their headline to say Johnson deleted “several” tweets following Gunn’s firing instead of 20,000. Our previous headline has been adjusted.

“It is worth mentioning that Johnson had already removed a substantial amount of tweets well before the Gunn incident (he had 2,312 on July 9), but cleared out a bulk post-Gunn firing. Check out a timeline shared on Twitter by user 30YearOldBoomer,” reported ScreenRant.

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