'Star Wars' Director Deletes 20,000 Tweets After James Gunn Firing: 'Seems Like a Why Not? Move'

Days after Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn was fired over old controversial tweets, Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson confirmed he had deleted about 20,000 tweets of his own.

Responding to a tweet about his social media purge, which seemed to suggest Johnson was trying to hide some things he had written in the past, the director claimed that wasn’t the case — the decision to delete all of his tweets from before January 25 just seemed like a no brainer decision.

“No official directive at all,” he wrote, arguing Disney (the studio behind the Star Wars franchise) was not behind the deletion.

“I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that bad. But it’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera,” he explained. “If trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new normal, this seems like a ‘why not?’ move.”

Johnson also went on to reveal that those looking to clean up their social media presence can do so with the help of an app.

Asked whether there was a fast way of deleting that many tweets, the director replied: “There are apps that do it literally with the flip of a switch.”

On July 20, Disney booted Gunn from the franchise he built after conservative Twitter users found posts in which the writer/director made insensitive jokes about pedophilia.

Gunn was set to start filming the third installment starring Chris Pratt in the fall and had been working on the script. He wrote and directed the first two movies, which have made more than $1.6 billion worldwide.

Johnson has signed on to create an entirely newStar Wars trilogy, which Disney has described as being “separate from the episodic Skywalker saga.” The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams is returning to take on 2019’s Episode IX.