Former 'X-Men '97' Showrunner Accuses Marvel Studios Of Abusing "Artists And Crew In The Pursuit Of Mediocre Results"
Former X-Men ‘97 showrunner Beau DeMayo accused Marvel Studios of abusing “artists and crew in the pursuit of mediocre results.”
DeMayo’s comments came in the wake of Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld calling for Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige to be removed from leadership.
Liefeld reacted to the abysmal Captain America: Brave New World box office numbers and posted on X, “Get Feige off the mound. He’s spent.”
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DeMayo reacted to this in a lengthy post detailing how Marvel Studios meddled with both the first season as well as a planned second season for X-Men ‘97.
First, he said, “It’s a cultural problem at the studio all the way to the top. Like look at X-Men ‘97. I had a locked 9 epsiode awesome season 2 done for them in animatic form in March 2024. It was ready to be animated, and would’ve undergone the same polish in post that Season 1 did (where I fine tuned and tightened a lot of the dialogue and pacing in editorial — especially since one of the directors didn’t work out and I was having other directors come in to fix their subpar work).”
“They have since re-opened it, tore it up, and a year later they STILL don’t have a locked season 2. STILL. It’s now a Frankenstein. Meanwhile, Marvel has silo’d the crew from what they’re doing because they don’t want to give up creative control like they had to with me. One exec in particular — who actively conspired to push me out — has basically seized control and isolates everyone so only she knows what’s going on. This is the same exec who said I was ‘too much of a fan’ and would reprimand me for engaging with fans online b/c God forbid you talk to your customers to learn what matters to them,” he continued.
He then noted this happened with Season 1 as well, “I had Season 1 of X-Men, with delays, ready far before we premiered last March. We sat on episodes and could’ve premiered (as originally planned) in Sept 2023. How they still don’t have Season 2 in shape is a testament to the incompetence that is tolerated — and in fact rewarded — at this studio.”
“Now, they can’t focus on Season 3 because the same bad customers at Marvel keep blowing up Season 2 (which I’ve now learned what they’ve done and it’s just not good), pitching ideas like Emma and Logan hooking up, and re-jiggering things because they have zero idea what I was planning or doing. Even worse, the crew is miserable and overworked.”
Finally, he concluded by accusing, “Once more, Marvel Studios doing the only thing it appears to do best lately: abuse artists and crew in the pursuit of mediocre results.”
DeMayo’s comments are not unheard of. Earlier this month he accused Marvel Studios of engaging in a smear campaign against him.
He said, “These allegations of egregious misconduct are false. The rumors spread around me online are lies, and they are offensive. But more concerning is that they’re a smear campaign designed to discredit my credibility to cover up egregious prejudicial misconduct stretching from select crew members on X-Men ‘97 all the way to the top of Marvel Studios.”
Later in the video he stated, “The things I witnessed while working at Marvel were beyond wrong and unethical. It is wrong for a crew producer who repeatedly whitesplains to his boss to respond to his boss’s concerns on January 9th of this year with, ‘This has jack s**t to do with me being white.’ It is wrong for that same producer to repeatedly joke to the crew about he showed my thirst traps on Instagram to his underage son and his kid is wondering do they need to buy me shirts for Christmas. It is wrong for this same producer when I notify them that one of our leads is having a potentially exploitative sexual relationship with a PA for this producer to bury my report and actually go to the individual in question and let them know that I had ratted on them so that they can then work together to discredit me.”
“It is wrong for Marvel execs to roll their eyes when I raise concerns about being bullied and targeted on account of my identity, to tell me to deal with it because these individuals are amazingly talented,” he continued. “It is wrong for an artist on the show to repeatedly denounce all men as jerks and to accuse me of failing the cause because I’m keeping a jerk like Cyclops as leader of the team. It is wrong to question my intelligence because my muscles don’t make me look like a writer or to talk about how I am thicc with two Cs. It is wrong for Marvel leadership to pat themselves on the back while giving me notes on a Blade script. A table of white men laughing as they tell me, ‘Hey, look at us! We hired a young Wesley Snipes to write the new Blade movie.’”
DeMayo continued to list all the things he claims to have experienced while working on Marvel as wrong including listing homosexuality as a hot button issue alongside abortion and Gaza, not wanting to alienate X-Men fans with a RuPaul Drag Show promotion, calling an interracial romance between Bishop and a white character as “creepy,” and being painted as a “nightmare” for wanting more representation with characters like Storm and Bishop.
He would go on to claim that Marvel “actively blacklisted” him from “non-Disney Comic-Con panels this past summer.”
Still later, he claimed that the crew that is still working on X-Men ‘97 “are still being abused just like I was. Abused with impossible pipeline demands that endanger their health and safety and studio politics that create a toxic environment that turns individuals against one another, stokes paranoia to ensure compliance.”
DeMayo also claimed, “They tried to intimidate me with both explicit and implied threats. I was not intimidated. Everything they have done since then has been designed not just to silence me and smear me, but crush me and remind me to know my role.”
Finally, he shared he wants to present all the evidence he claims to have backing up these allegations to “Disney and Marvel and work with them so that those responsible are able to receive what I was not: A full and fair investigation away from the public eye. One that is confidential and that resembles some form of just ethical due process. Disney, Marvel my team and I have already started your investigation, I have the receipts and I have the eyewitnesses.”
What do you make of DeMayo’s accusations?
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