X-Men ’97 Showrunner Beau DeMayo Fired by Marvel

Television

Can the new “non-binary” Morph turn take the form of a pink slip? I doubt the people behind it care enough to know, but at least one of them doesn’t have his hands on the X-Men anymore. The Hollywood Reporter exclusively reveals that Beaut DeMayo, the showrunner of the upcoming Disney+ Marvel series X-Men ‘97, has been fired. According to THR, this happened “early last week,” and DeMayo’s “company email was deactivated” and his Instagram account taken down. What makes this such a surprise is that X-Men ‘97 is going to begin airing on Disney+ in a week, on March 20. The red carpet Hollywood premiere is tomorrow, and DeMayo was going to attend; he was even discussing his plans for the next two seasons of the show. There was no reason given for DeMayo’s firing, and no one from his camp returned THR’s requests for comment, while Marvel commented with “no comment.”

This is a strange one. Why get rid of a showrunner just before his show premieres? I think there are a few possibilities. One is that X-Men ‘97 is so awful that the studio that released The Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and She-Hulk wanted Beau DeMayo removed from the series. It’s not hard to believe this could be the case; DeMayo also wrote for Moon Knight (which I didn’t see, but by all accounts, it ain’t good) and penned one of the unused drafts for the Blade movie that Marvel still pinkie-swears is going to happen. The only things DeMayo has written that I’ve seen were two episodes of The Witcher, and while I don’t remember either of them well, that show was unmemorable at its very best. Why they took that guy and gave him the X-Men – particularly the sequel to/continuation of probably the most beloved X-Men adaptation ever – is a mystery. Oh, wait, no it’s not; remember when he said this (via Bounding Into Comics)?

“I think one of my favorite parts was like they were truly interested in like what my experience as a black gay man was and how it was going to inform the story we were telling. And that to them was like that is how we’re going to make this authentic.”

This is what they all do now. They don’t ask how a writer sees the characters or their world or the stories that can be told with them; they figure out how many boxes the writer ticks and make sure that will inform everything they write. It’s almost not worth questioning whether the writers, producers, and directors care about the characters because nobody at Marvel seems to, either.

Another possibility is that the pushback they received over things like the new and improved “non-binary” Morph was so great that they wanted to make a gesture to get fans to watch X-Men ‘97, and firing Beau DeMayo was it. I don’t think this is likely, especially before the show even airs. They have too much disdain for the public to do something for public relations reasons. The last potential reason I can think of is that they found out something troubling about DeMayo. I don’t know what that could be, and I certainly don’t want to speculate, but it would explain the suddenness of his termination and his deleting his Instagram account, as well as the silence on both sides. I imagine more will come to light about what really happened soon, but for now, it’s more unexpected than the changes they’re making to the X-Men.