X-Men '97 Former Showrunner Launches On Kevin Feige Calling For His Firing From Marvel Studios

Beau DeMayo is the embattled former showrunner for Disney+’s X-Men ‘97 cartoon, fired last year, and he’s unloading on Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige on X after feeling slighted for his firing.

It started on August 14th, when he revealed his thoughts on future Marvel Studios X-Men projects:

Ugh, a follower asked me if I had faith in @MarvelStudios Mutant Saga and I clicked away and lost the message so hopefully they see this, but also I get asked this a lot so I wanted to make a larger post that may piss some of you off. I’m sorry in advance.

First, the X-Men are so much bigger than any one creative, myself included. Would I have loved to write, direct, steer the live action films? Of course. But I have great faith that there are amazing artists out there who have amazing visions and stories to tell with the X-Men.

Now, do I have faith in the MCU’s Mutant Saga?

Short answer: Not yet, no. And let me walk through why so you don’t think I’m just being a hater.

X-Men requires planning, deep planning to pull them off and make them resonate. You also have to be very mindful of how you’re laying out their story, and the way in which audiences will experience the story. You also need to suppress your ego to “make it your own” and focus on meeting the mutants on THEIR terms, which means deeply respecting their canon and the emotional investment that fans have in that canon.

With this in mind , this is the start of @MarvelStudios Mutant Saga:

- A retcon and musical sting in Ms Marvel that she’s now somehow a mutant. Literally, our first intro to the X-Men in the MCU is not one of the decades worth of mutants but a YA retcon that Kevin forced onto the franchise to “make it his own” and out the “MCU spin.” And it is a tease and retcon that they still have not paid off.

- To the above, for DECADES X-Men fans have waited for teenage mutants like Jubilee and Kitty Pryde to get their justice and due in film. Kevin knows this, but just like Fox shoved a teenage retcon’d Rogue down our throats, Kevin and Marvel are shocked Khan down our throats when far more interesting mutants would do. It’s a fuck you to fans, and having been in the room with these guys it is absolutely all ego. Even having a newly cast Jubilee show up at the end of Ms Marvel to recruit her would’ve been better than the instantly forgettable tag we got.

- A weird nostalgia cameo of Professor X in Doctor Strange 2 that used the animated series sting, where Kevin thought it’d be fresh and cool to see the revered leader and activist visionary of the X-Men’s entire creed get brutally murdered…AGAIN.

- Next, Monica Rambeau somehow finding herself transported back to meet Beast from THE WORST X-MEN movie ever made. Add that these two characters have ZERO history or irony to having met one another in the same way that say Nick Fury coming to meet Tony Stark had in Phase 1. All the tags in Phase 1 begged a clear exciting story — the creation of the Avengers. What the hell does Beast and Monica tease? Nothing. It’s just a desperate play to make us care. Want a better tag? What if the film ended with Monica or Carol waking up to meet….Anna Paquin’s Rogue? Now THAT does what the MCU’s phase one tags did.

- the retries of Wolverine and Deadpool from the Fox franchise that the MCU and Kevin had zero to do with, to tell a fan-pandering story of Reddit-wishlists that seemed to say farewell to the Fox universe. Again. And yet again, the MCU being like Fox in this lazy reliance on Wolverine as the face of the X-Men.

- A contrived MacGuffin plot of adamantium in Captain America Brave New World that has amounted to nothing, and begs timeline questions where I guess Ms Marvel is a mutant before Wolverine entered Weapon X.

- Lastly, all the Fox characters we thought were gone and dead, are being brought out YET AGAIN to manufacture artificial interest and distract from Kevin and @MarvelStudios decade long flailing of frequent failures.

He then called for Kevin Feige to be fired, citing Rob Liefeld and following up with another long quote tweet of himself:

Another fun fact about @MarvelStudios and Kevin’s Parliment. Example, the lead producer on Avengers Infinty War and Endgame had her assistant working overtime reading comics that she was too busy to read. Same when they started working on NOMAD, which ultimately fell apart because they couldn’t crack it right. Well, yeah, if you haven’t researched the character and that arc, you’re gonna be hard pressed to crack it. The many times we had a story issue come up in script or script editorial in #xmen97 and I was able to quickly pull a solve outta my ass using my knowledge of the comics had me Thanking God I’d done my homework.

Today he also followed up on an article about his original tweet, saying:

Yep. I was told this in a phone call after Ep 5 premiered. I asked the exec if Kevin was happy, because stupidly I still wanted to help the studio out. There response was a long pause, and then I was told that he’d be “happier” if fans and audiences weren’t using it as a referendum on what the MCU needs to be doing to fix itself. What makes it worse I think is that Kevin has nothing to do with #xmen97 and could take no credit for it. Even internally, before the show aired, Marvel employees were reaching out to me asking how I was able to make a show this good given where the studio was, and how it’s the best thing the studio had done. With their praise I noticed more and more that I was becoming a threat and regret to studio leadership. And again, Kevin and Lou couldn’t even be bothered to come to the premiere of the show at the El Capitan. They didn’t show up to thank the fans. They didn’t show up to thank @xmentas, the Lewald’s and Houston or the OG voice cast, for how they built that foundation back in the 90s of the MCU. Nope we were just a little cartoon that wasn’t sexy enough or taken seriously enough to warrant that great Kevin Feige to attend."

While it’s very clear he blames Kevin Feige, rumors circulated that DeMayo was fired during the production of X-Men ‘97 for inappropriate behavior, including posting several lewd photos to his X account. He is an “out and proud” homosexual man who likes to push boundaries and even had an OnlyFans at one point.

His instance of his firing doesn’t invalidate his criticisms of Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios, but it may be there’s more to his being angry than the way the studio operates and looks at storytelling.

What do you think of Beau DeMayo launching on Marvel Studios? Leave a comment and let us know.

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