I’m not sure when Gina Carano really started saying and tweeting offensive crap, but people really began to take notice of it last year, when Carano’s role in The Mandalorian became a fan-favorite, and thus, the spotlight on Carano got a lot bigger. Last year, she was making fun of trans-inclusionary language and she criticized… mask-wearing protocols in a deadly pandemic. Around the election and after the election, she was absolutely tweeting out MAGA-adjacent sh-t, and then last week, she posted this disgustingly convoluted thing about how Republicans are being treated like Jewish people during the Holocaust. That was final domino – Disney and Lucasfilm said “enough” and they fired her outright. Her agents dropped her too. Carano instantly became a cause célèbre among fascists and Nazis, and she will probably spend the rest of her career making sad-clown MAGA films with Kirk Cameron. The Hollywood Reporter has a new story about what was happening behind-the-scenes – go here to read the full piece. Some highlights:

Disney knew Carano was a MAGA loose cannon last year: In Carano’s case, the move to cut ties had been brewing for some time. In the months leading up to Disney’s investor day presentation Dec. 10, Carano’s agents at UTA were negotiating for the actress to receive a sizable bump for a planned spinoff of Disney+’s The Mandalorian that was to star her fan-favorite character, Cara Dune. The actress, who sources say made $25,000 to $50,000 per episode of The Mandalorian, was poised to be touted during the presentation, in which Kathleen Kennedy announced 10 new Star Wars shows, including Rangers of the New Republic, a series that seemed tailor-made for Carano. But Carano was nowhere to be found during the lengthy presentation.

Disney knew by December that they couldn’t do a spinoff with her: “She was originally in that presentation when they announced all those things, and they pulled her off of it,” a source tells The Hollywood Reporter. A Lucasfilm source counters that Carano was never officially part of the Dec. 10 presentation and no negotiations for future work had taken place.

Disney is now being accused of pandering to the left? “I don’t know what people at Disney personally believe or don’t believe with regard to politics, but as a corporate entity, they want to stay as trouble-free as possible. And anything that’s going to offend the left is a problem,” says crisis PR rep Juda Engelmayer. “I have clients who are making an extraordinary effort to post what the social left wants to see.”

This wasn’t on Jon Favreau: The decision to banish Carano from the Disney kingdom went higher than Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau and was made by Lucasfilm executives. Carano, sources say, had repeatedly been warned by those around her about her social media behavior, with the actress even noting publicly in September that her Mandalorian co-star Pedro Pascal, who has a trans sibling, educated her about the use of pronouns after a social media flare-up. “She knew it was going to alarm people,” says one person in her orbit of her recent posts. “Why would you put Favreau in that position?”

No more Cara Dune action figures: Carano’s ouster had a domino effect, with Hasbro ending production on its popular Cara Dune action figures. (Hasbro says there are “no current plans to create more” Dune products.) Amazon appears to have pulled most of its Cara Dune toy merchandise. When asked why, an Amazon rep declined further comment. Meanwhile, the Dune action figures are seeing brisk sales on eBay at prices well above the original list prices.

Will Cara Dune be recast? Insiders say Cara Dune wasn’t part of the Star Wars series next up, a Boba Fett spinoff, but expect that the character will be recast down the road, for both story and merchandising reasons. A source at Lucasfilm says that a recasting is not expected, however.

Lucasfilm is trying to do better: Carano’s firing comes at an inflection point for Lucasfilm, which was previously criticized for not more strongly defending Star Wars sequel trilogy stars John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran from racist bullying online over the years. On Jan. 23, the company signaled a shift when it put out a statement of support for Krystina Arielle, the host of The High Republic Show, after she was subject to racist bullying and threats.

[From THR]

I guess I have to give props to whatever Lucasfilm or Disney executive who kept his ear to the ground on social media last year and realized that Carano was a disaster waiting to happen. It feels like her spinoff was going to happen as late as November or the first week in December, but then executives were like “you know what, let’s wait on this.” And I’ve see, on Deuxmoi, much of the same stuff about Favreau’s role in this, which THR reports here – I heard that Favreau wasn’t happy with Carano’s sh-t and that Disney executives were well aware, and there were high-level discussions about Carano and around/including Carano. She was clearly told to tone it down and not be so f–king offensive and deranged online. Oh well. Now she gets to cry about her FREEDUMB to literal Nazis.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.