Amazon drops James Gunn's planned Starsky and Hutch reboot

Plans for a reboot of Starsky and Hutch on Amazon from Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn have been axed, it has emerged.

The director was in line to bring the 70s cops, originally played by David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser, back to TV for the streaming studio, in an announcement made last summer.

But according to Yahoo Finance, the project has now been shelved.

It follows Disney’s decision to axe the director from the Guardians of the Galaxy series, after details of offensive tweets posted some years ago came to the fore thanks to a far-right activist.

However, Amazon has said that it had already decided to can the show prior to the recent controversy.

“We passed on the project completely months ago,” said a spokesperson. “There was no statement. This is the same for any other project we do not move forward with.”

Disney called Gunn’s remarks, which had been deleted but then resurfaced, ‘indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values’.

Gunn has apologised for the content of the tweets, which joked about rape and paedophilia, saying that when he made them, ‘I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo’.

“My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative,” he added.

“I have regretted them for many years since — not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.”

Gunn was set to start filming the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie in the autumn, with a release date planned for 2020.

Meanwhile, an online petition to see him reinstated by Disney is approaching 300,000 signatures, at the time of publishing.

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