'X-Men '97' Showrunner Accuses Marvel Studios Of Having "Plantation Country Club Vibes" And Says A Certain Demographic Of Creator Gets To "Fail Upwards"
X-Men ‘97 showrunner Beau DeMayo accused Marvel Studios of having “plantation country club vibes” and declared that only a certain demographic is available to fail upwards in Hollywood while reacting to a report that Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier will direct an X-Men movie.
Following a report from Variety that Schreier would direct an X-Men film, DeMayo made his accusations writing on X in a now-deleted post, “Oh, look, only at Marvel Studios with its plantation country club vibes can you direct a decent film that doesn’t break even at the box office and land this gig.”
“Oh to fit a certain demographic in Hollywood and just fail upwards,” he added. “ZEO interest in seeing what him and another mediocre fail-upwards come up with this. At least we knew we’re getting Iger’s version of X-Men that has zero authentic exploration of the core themes of X-Men. Like this is f***ing pathetic choice.”
READ: James Gunn Claims 'Superman' Film Is About "Kindness," And It Shows "Who Superman Is As A Person"
In another post he accused Marvel of firing a writer on Blade because one of the male leads did not like her script, “Well, they got straight white men steering it to so they can avoid what happened on Blade when a lead on the project threw a script by a black female writer across the room and shouted ‘this is why I don’t like working with women!’”
He continued, “What did Marvel Studios do? Fired her to appease this male lead on the project. Not only that, but they routinely bad-mouthed her openly on the set until a black assistant came to me and told me about the above because they were so morally conflicted over it.”
“What did Marvel Studios leadership do when I reported it to Marvel? Booted me off Blade and then made my life hell on X-Men ‘97 because I had dared to speak up to their vaunted Parliament. And yea, I have the receipts and witnesses for all of this,” he concluded.
A day later and DeMayo apologized to Schreier, “In retrospect, I came down a little hard on Jake Schreier. So I do want to apologize.”
However, he doubled down on his accusations against Marvel Studios, “However, I do stand by the fact that Marvel largely seems to only let POC directors direct POC movies, and X-Men is way overdue to have more diverse creative leadership both in film/tv and the comics. This is just a fact, and I do find it pathetic that Marvel is not trying to be bolder and more ambitious with one of its most important properties.”
“A lot of my POV is also informed by having worked in several projects with Marvel and witnessed their preference for white or white-passing creatives,” he continued. “This has been part of the company culture for decades, and well documented with Ike P[erlmutter]’s departure. But he was just part of a far larger cancer in that studio.”
“So yes, I’ll lose my temper at times because of what I experienced and survived, and because I continue to have to defend myself against an insane smear campaign that’s been launched with zero evidence. I’m human. I make mistakes. And I’ll own them, but there is a larger experience I’m speaking from here. Anyway, back to Friday business,” he concluded.
READ: Russell Crowe To Join Henry Cavill In 'Highlander' Reboot As Ramirez
DeMayo is no stranger to making accusations against Marvel Studios. Back in February he accused the studio of abusing “artists and crew in the pursuit of mediocre results.”
In a post reacting to Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld calling for Feige to be removed from Marvel Studios, DeMayo wrote, “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.
“I had Season 1 of X-Men, with delays, ready far before we premiered last March,” he went on. “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 also previously accused Marvel 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.’”
READ: J.K. Rowling Reveals She's "Working Closely" With The Writers On HBO's Harry Potter TV Show
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 latest allegations against Marvel Studios?
Schreier is definitely not a white man, but this DEI hire doesn't have the balls to notice that. He didn't have a problem with Marvel's hiring practices until they fired him. He destroyed the legacy of one of the best cartoons of all time by inserting alphabet propaganda. All he deserves is irrelevance.
It isn't a "white" mentality: just the opposite. The so-called "white" people at the top come from a certain tribe who like to claim they're white, but when pressed on social platforms claim they are... (semitic).
I saw the sickness in H-wood back in the 70s. When trying to hint at it on YouTube, I get instantly auto-blocked. What I was expected to do as an 11 year old boy with a (now dead) Jewish producer was SICK.
These people are SICK.