X-Men ’97 Showrunner Exposes Marvel Studios’ Biggest Fail

Yes, I’m late to the party. I have more important priorities this month, but I did finally have time to look into Beau DeMayo’s comments about working on X-Men ’97 when it comes to dealing with Marvel Studios, and while DeMayo clearly has some personal biases, it does confirm some of the issues I have with modern Marvel in live-action and in comics. Also this is the same guy who exposed similar approaches by the writers of The Witcher, which also seemed to be against the source material as previously exposed by Henry Cavil, the former star of the series. So despite DeMayo’s personal beef about being fired, allegedly for his OnlyFans accound and allegations of acting like a pervert to the team, I’m inclined to believe at least most of his comments.

Said comments were about how Marvel Studios treated his show, how they planned out Marvel Cinematic Universe productions, and confirms their opinion on the source material, the comics that Marvel gets its name from. I’ve brought up multiple times that Hollywood, including Marvel’s adopted parent company Disney, looks down on comics and cartoons. DeMayo, being an alleged fan of both, worked on the two things they hate. While some of what he says could be chocked up to personal bias as to how he felt he was treated and I can’t rule out confirmation bias without further unbiased confirmation, everything I mentioned when it comes to Marvel history and Hollywood history (there’s a producer who outright stated in an article that he didn’t want someone who knew the comics to work on the movies), is proven accurate with his comments. That disclaimer aside, let’s read the actual comments.

Like Matt Shankman and the writers of Fantastic Four [I assume First Steps -SWT], I’ve sat in the “creative meetings” at Marvel Studios. They’re horrible.

You basically sit in a room with Kevin Feige and Lou D’Esposito and try to pitch your movie while also realizing that Kevin just wants you to dictate his rushed thoughts. Victoria used to be in these but Kevin and Lou had so mistreated her that in one of my Blade meetings she just showed up with sugar cookies she’d bake to help improve morale.

You’re even told NOT to try to pitch ideas from the comics because Lou isn’t a big comic guy and it’ll turn him off.

Artist conception of modern Marvel Studios treating the audience.

I’m assuming D’Esposito is the producer who said he didn’t want comic-knowledgeable people on the movies. This is taking media bias to a new level of stupid. If someone wanted to hire me to work on the Walking Dead franchise, as someone who doesn’t like zombie stories, I wouldn’t suddenly change everything to match my kind of story. I’d admit I’m the wrong person for the job and let someone who at least cares about doing it properly take over. This is just good creativity, and moviemakers are part of the creative storytelling circle…as are the comic makers. If you don’t care about the comics, go produce something that has nothing to do with comics. Media bias will ruin the end product, which we’ve seen out of Marvel Studios since the committee that over saw comic accuracy (the only good committee in Hollywood) was disbanded.

Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad, when Toy Biz owned Marvel Entertainment, knew that making the comic fans happy with comic accuracy while making move fans happy with not requiring the comics to understand what was going on in the movies equaled more sold merchandise plus the money from theaters, home video, television airings, and streaming. By ditching that and not even making good stories to cover it, the end result of the MCU has been a decline in quality of both adaptation and storytelling, as they chase audiences with the same media biases but have the option to watch anything else. They play to the wrong audience, themselves, because the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd wants everything made for them, even if they don’t care otherwise. So the audience who would watch these shows and movies go back to the comics and older media and the cool kids stick to the things they like. Hollywood’s adaptation machine has never understood any of this, so now Marvel Studios has tossed one of the main reasons for their existence.

You sit and talk about craft and story and characters only to have Kevin and Lou say “yeah well, all we need to do is make sure it’s fun” and etc etc.

They can’t even do that right.

There’s no spark. There’s no vision. Marvel is a slaughterhouse factory where you watch fresh meat get spoiled as it slowly makes its way through the assembly gears of mediocre thinking and this weird hatred for their own product. This is why Rob Liefeld isn’t just some bitter old man. Talking about the comic book writers is met with open contempt. I had to fight to get the Lewalds involved on X-Men ’97 and even then the dismissive news with which [VP Of Animation] Dana Vasquez-Eberhart spoke about them, basically telling me the OG creators were meant to be seen not heard to appease fans. I wanted to cowrite an ep with them and that was Dana’s response. I even remember wanting to talk to [famed X-titles writer] Chris Claremont and being shut down, or wanting [X-titles artist] Joe Madureira to do posters, just as I was scolded for being too friendly with fans, or coming off too much as one.

Considering the fans are the only reason X-Men ’97, a supposed continuation of the fan favorite Fox Kids series (I prefer Kids WB’s X-Men Evolution personally), you’d think you’d want to be friendly with them, as they’re your actual viewer base. They really don’t care about what they’re making.

DeMayo then goes into a pitch he made for that Blade movie they pretend to want to make. I don’t know enough about Blade or the magic side of the Marvel universe to really judge it, though I did think Wundagore was a science place, not a magic place. Basically he wanted to tie it to Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch’s stories by including the Darkhold, vampires, a character named Deacon Frost and the days of who or whatever Kull is.

To Kevin’s credit, he liked the idea, as well as my pitch that magic is to Blade what snakes are to Indiana Jones: he hates magic. But then Lou felt it was too comic book while Mahershala bumped on there being magic in the film tonally. And then I watched as them and Nate Moore [VP of Production & Development at the time] picked it apart and we were off to a new draft.

It’s a broken machine, and so I can see where Matt and his team probably had great ideas only for Marvel’s arrogance to destroy them.

Lou, you’re an idiot. You are making a movie based on comic books. Marvel Studios used to remember, embrace, and promote that. You changed direction and that’s why you’re failing. Then another X-Twitter poster asked about what changed between phases three and four (Avengers: Endgame and the Infinity Saga of the first three phases versus phase four starting with Black Widow and Loki). The easy answer is that anyone who cared about the comics or comic accuracy, either because they like the comics or realize the comic fans are their biggest free promotion and merch money machine, was gone by that point and all you had were media snobs more interested in “their” stories than continuing chronicling the lives of these characters and brands they only see as cheap promotional material without understanding why someone actually likes “that crap”.

Look, I think Kevin and Marvel used to trust their directors and writers to do their jobs, which is to take our love of their IP and apply our decades-worth of filmmaking craft to make them sing on screen.

But, success gets to folks and soon you start getting high off your own supply. Appeasing actors and protecting your job becomes more important than the characters.

As one Marvel employee told me, “they make it clear that every good thought came from Kevin. He is the celebrity.”

I remember watching Icons Unearthed: Marvel, which went over the history of Marvel adaptations up to the early years of the MCU, and they also tried to make the case that Feige was the reason Marvel Studios did so well, and it would only get better after getting rid of the guys that created the company. Look how well that (didn’t) work for Lucasfilm after Star Wars was “saved” from George Lucas. I’m not surprised that ego mixes with media bias among the Hollywood elitists.

This is why X-Men ’97 was such a threat to them. Brad greenlit it on the sky and then no one took me seriously. Marvel Studios took one look at me and my Instagram and said this is some brown gay muscle kid who’s more style than substance. He’ll make something cute.

And then I did more than that, and I did it without Kevin or Lou or their studio. I did it with a team of amazing artists and animators who rallied OUTSIDE of the system to make something for the fans even as folks like Dana V-Eberhart made our lives Hell. I remember begging Dana to give the crew a hiatus for Season 3 and that a lot of folks were unhappy. Her response, and I quote: “we’ll just get new blood. It’ll be good for the show.”

The same response they give their special effects people, no doubt. It’s strange (not to be confused with the doc). It should be part of these peoples’ jobs to know what goes into making a movie, keeping the budgets under control, and making sure the end product reaches the right audience, and yet everything we saw before and with DeMayo’s conversations say the opposite is true. This is why Disney and their various acquired subsidiaries are failing so miserably.

This gets at Marvel’s core issue: they started to see their artists as disposable and replaceable because all Marvel needed was Kevin’s brilliance.

That turned out not to be the case, and X-Men ’97 was direct proof of that. I remember speaking to an exec after the show premiere and asking if Kevin was happy with it being such a hit?

Their response, after a long pause: “ehhh, He’d be happier if it wasn’t being used as a referendum on what’s broken at the studio. He also worked on X2 and doesn’t like that folks are saying it’s better than the Fox movies.”

The original cartoon was even popular in Japan. I wonder what they thought of the relaunch?

That’s not the show’s fault. The early Fox movies were actually well received. It was later when they messed around with the characters, brought in a director who didn’t do as good a job, and badly adapted the Phoenix Saga–TWICE IN A ROW!!!!!!–that fans were turned off. Even the reboot attempt was kind of lackluster. This may also explain why Feige wasn’t happy with Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool & Wolverine. Despite being a love letter/epilogue to the Fox era of X-Men, Fantastic Four, and his own Deadpool, it did (from what I hear as I don’t like either character generally speaking) take shots at Disney Marvel, which Feige is in full control of, and some of the bad decisions and gimmicks the MCU uses these days like reusing actors as new characters. Admittedly, this is the part where DeMayo would be at the most biased, but we’ve seen signs of it in the past.

That Park Place also looked into the posts back when they came out, noting that DeMayo fought for the creators as well as the fans. Not surprising he’d get the Jim Shooter treatment. Marvel Comics once went so far as to create and put out a character nobody even remembers just to scuttle Shooter’s plans to create a new comic company by giving the universe Plasmer to be able to legally sue Shooter’s Defiant Comics and Warriors Of Plasm, which has been announced before and even had merchandise on QVC back when they had a show for comic merchandise. Marvel Studios does have a history of choosing the wrong parts of Marvel Comics to adapt. See also Ironheart.

Does DeMayo have an axe to grind? Most definitely. Does that mean he’s lying? Not likely. Between confirming everything Cavill said about working on The Witcher as well as scoops, behind the scenes leaks, and even what they have said, the idea that they might not be treating the source material right due to their bias and egos are very likely. Marvel Studios was created to make good movies for the general audience that were also good general adaptations of the comic for the fans, winning over everyone who would want to see the action movies with superheroes, sci-fi, and magic (or what passes for it in the MCU) and were pre-existing fans of the characters and concept. Instead they now pursue the cool kids and other butts they want to kiss, and the end result has been a huge downslide in quality of work and adaptation. If Marvel doesn’t pull themselves together soon, they’re going to kill what’s left of their legacy. Just like the rest of Disney’s acquired fallen franchises that only fell because of Disney.