Dave Bautista Clarifies His Comments About Quitting Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3

After James Gunn was removed from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 last summer, the future looked bleak for the cosmic comic book movie franchise. Not only was it missing the writer/director who had shaped the first two films, but one of its stars was threatening to walk. All of the cast signed an open letter to Disney asking for Gunn to be reinstated, but Dave Bautista went further: deciding to openly air his frustration and grievances with the studio on social media.

This included discussing how he had no wish to continue with the franchise following Gunn’s firing, and his hope to potentially star in Gunn’s The Suicide Squad for DC instead. Thankfully, everything’s back on track now as Gunn was rehired in March and Bautista is happy to continue playing Drax in the MCU.

Now that he can look back at the situation though, the actor explained to ET that he wasn’t suggesting he wanted to jump ship from Marvel to DC to spite Disney but simply that he wanted to work with his friend. If that happened to be on TSS rather than GotG Vol. 3, then so be it.

“No, it wasn’t that I was going to jump ship and do Suicide Squad. I was more at the point where I was like, ‘Fire me. I don’t care. You’re going to hear what I have to say.’ And this is the way I feel and I think you made a bad call and I don’t care if you fire me because I feel this way. This is me being honest and me sticking up for my friend who was wronged.’ So that was it. It wasn’t about me — I’m not threatening to go do Suicide Squad, but I was just saying, ‘If things aren’t here, I’m just going to leave. I don’t want to be a part of this.'”

Reports said that Bautista was due to join Task Force X in the Suicide Squad sequel, but his ever-growing schedule prevented him from signing on. It’s believed that John Cena has been snapped up instead for the role Bautista would’ve played: Christopher Smith/Peacemaker.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 would originally have released next year, but now there’ll obviously be a bit of a delay. We’ve heard that Marvel is keen to get the threequel out as soon as possible, though, with filming expected to start in 2020 before a possible drop in 2021.