Jake Schreier is Directing X-Men, and Beau DeMayo is Angry
The MCU’s first X-Men movie officially has its director, and the showrunner of X-Men ‘97 is not happy. Today, Variety confirmed that Marvel has officially named Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier as the filmmaker who would bring the X-Men into the MCU… well, outside of Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy… and Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars returning vets Joe and Anthony Russo. But you know what I mean; Schreier is directing X-Men, or whatever they end up calling it. I figured this would be a boring story since it’s just a confirmation of something we pretty much knew was going to happen. But then, Beau DeMayo threw a grenade on it and backed that up with a neutron bomb. DeMayo was the showrunner of X-Men ‘97, the revival of the outstanding X-Men animated series from the 90s that everyone expected to suck but was, by all accounts (I still haven’t seen it), pretty damn good. Supposedly, DeMayo nailed the characters in X-Men ‘97, so it’s unsurprising that, unlike most people Marvel hires nowadays, he actually cares about them, and he has some heated thoughts about Schreier helming their next movie:
Oh, look, only at @MarvelStudios 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
ZERO interest in seeing what him and… https://t.co/oUnefrEsHb
— Beau DeMayo (@BeauDemayo) June 19, 2025
As much as I like a lot of the things DeMayo has been saying since Marvel fired him – including his awesome idea for a new Blade movie – it’s kind of hard to imagine Marvel’s checklist for directors is white, heterosexual, and male right now. They’ve gone out of their way to preen about how progressive they are in picking directors like Nia DaCosta, Julius Onah, Chloé Zhao, and Ryan Coogler, and they wear their agenda like a badge of honor. But his next X post tells a story about something he alleges happened during the development of the Blade movie that never materialized:
Well, they got straight white men steering it 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!”
What did @MarvelStudios do? Fired her to appease…
— Beau DeMayo (@BeauDemayo) June 19, 2025
Obviously, I have no idea if this story is true, and while DeMayo says he has witnesses, it’s all just allegations at the moment (and I imagine it’ll stay that way). But if it is true, Marvel would be far from the first hypocritical studio or company that preached one thing and practiced another. I still think they push hard on diversity in general, but it’s not hard to believe that a studio would get rid of people it saw as a problem, no matter who they were. What’s even more interesting is DeMayo’s suggestion that they forced him out of X-Men ‘97 over this incident. Again, we have no way of knowing if that’s true, but it seems odd that Marvel would get rid of one of the few guys in recent years who made something people actually like. Then again, Kevin Feige bragged about never again working with the director who brought Marvel into the billion-dollar club while handing X-Men to the guy who directed their latest bomb, so it’s not like we’re talking about geniuses here.
Aside from his allegations, I agree with DeMayo’s assessment of Jake Schreier as the director of X-Men. He feels like a bad choice because he just made a bad movie that lost money and is being rewarded for it. And while I don’t know about the racial connotations, I get the “country club” comment because Marvel has become very incestuous in its hiring practices, handing big projects to the people behind lousy TV shows or movies. Remember when Drew Goddard was in the running to direct Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but they gave it to the Shang-Chi guy instead? And The Fantastic Four: First Steps is coming to you from the director of every episode of WandaVision. It’s lazy and boring, and it shows that they don’t care anymore; they don’t go looking for the best possible writers or filmmakers, pairing the right creatives with the right movies. They just go to the coffee room and pick whoever’s not busy… unless they made something halfway decent, of course.
Let us know what you think of Beau DeMayo’s reaction to Jake Schreier directing X-Men in the comments!
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