X-Men '97 Showrunner Addresses Disney's Claims in Video Statement

Last year, X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo was fired by Disney and Marvel, with Marvel releasing a statement that he was terminated following an internal investigation and citing the egregious nature of the investigation’s findings. DeMayo has addressed those claims in specific instances on social media, but today DeMayo released a much lengthier and more detailed statement regarding those claims on YouTube. The statement addresses DeMayo’s time on X-Men ’97 as well as his work on the Blade film, and you can find several excerpts from the video below. The full video can be found here.

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“The allegations being made against me are very serious and I take them seriously. It’s why I took the time to myself these last few weeks, one, to sit with my legal team and figure out how best to respond, but more importantly just sit with those I love, those closest to me, and assure them of what I will assure you now and what they already knew these allegations of egregious misconduct are false,” DeMayo said.

He continued, “The rumors being spread around me online are lies and they are offensive but more concerning is that a smear can be designed to discredit my credibility in order to cover up egregious prejudicial misconduct stretching from select crew members on X-Men ’97 all the way to the top of Marvel Studios, and they’re not just trying to discredit me using incredibly misleading press releases, but also through coordinated leaks and bot attacks as well as anonymous scoops being given to tabloid sites and podcasters.”

“When I took the job on X-Men I was told that they valued my perspective and experiences as a queer, Black man, and I made it very clear to them that I was not going to be the Black stamp of approval on the project, so it was agreed that due to the themes of the X-Men as well as my experience and the just general excitement around my pitch, that I would supervise all areas and stages of production,” DeMayo recalled.

X-Men ’97 was the highly anticipated sequel series to Fox’s X-Men: The Animated Series program from the ’90s. Before the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the program introduced an entire generation of viewers to the beloved characters. Many filmmakers used the series as a touchstone to guide their storytelling approach to MCU characters, with the development of a sequel series earning Disney and Marvel tremendous positive buzz.

Fans were shocked to hear that DeMayo was fired before the series even premiered, with matters only getting more complicated with the acclaim the series earned. While Disney and Marvel remained relatively tight-lipped about the situation, DeMayo had expressed he would eventually have the opportunity to share his perspective on the situation.

“Now with this, I assume the studio would protect me from those who maybe harbor biases against having someone who looks, speaks, dresses, and thinks like me as their creative leader and boss. Now why was this important to me? Guys, just turn on the news. It’s common for minorities in leadership roles to not be taken seriously. To have their credentials and their resumés continually questioned by those above and below then and just generally be written off as a diversity hire who didn’t earn the job,” DeMayo detailed. “I thought Marvel would have my back against this stuff. Instead, the studio looked the other way as my identity was weaponized by Marvel execs and select crew members to undermine me. Create a humiliating environment where people feel emboldened to use the same dog-whistling stereotypes favored by bigots for decades. He’s big, he’s intimidating, too opinionated, angry, emotional, flamboyant, dramatic, a pervert.”

“When I called these things out they pivoted to attacking my talent. Accusing me of being too much of a fanboy,” DeMayo said. “They openly resented me fighting for the fans, fighting for the comics. They accused me of playing karaoke with those comics, and repeatedly I was told by these individuals that we should be doing our own version of X-Men. Writing new stories and not adapting those written by old white men, by which I could only assume they were referencing individuals like Stan Lee and Chris Claremont. Now, my response to this was to try to calmly outline that fans didn’t want to see our version of the X-Men. They, like me, want to see the characters that they have loved for decades faithfully adapted on screen.”

After DeMayo made posts on social media insinuating that there was much more to the story, a representative for Marvel shared the statement, “Mr. DeMayo was terminated in March 2024 following an internal investigation. Given the egregious nature of the findings, we severed ties with him immediately and he has no further affiliation with Marvel.”

“Now in return these individuals would then attempt to sabotage me and my job, painting me as abusive when I decline to make wholesale changes to characters. When I decline to have Jubilee fire plasmoids from her mouth or make gang signs, or paint the sky with plasmoids in the shape of middle fingers. What was worse and what really just hurt is, as I fought for what I felt that fans and audiences want, I was then being painted as being uncollaborative. Too difficult. Too much of a fanboy and one executive’s favorite phrase to fire at me, ‘Beau, you need to learn to turn your comic book collector brain off.’ They chose to treat me as a child that needed to be scolded, even as I was drawing upon 40-plus years of dealing with ignorance just like theirs. Having survived traumas that they cannot even begin to imagine never mind understand or appreciate,” DeMayo said.

“I think the simplest way to put it is that the things I witnessed while working at Marvel were beyond wrong and unethical. It is wrong for a crew producer who repeatedly white-splains to his boss to respond to his boss’s concerns on January 9th of this year with ‘this has Jack to do with me being white.’ It is wrong for that same producer to repeatedly joke to the crew about how 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,” DeMayo said.

“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. 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,’ and one of the reasons I wanted to do this video is so that you can see that Wesley Snipes and I look nothing alike,” DeMayo said.

“It is wrong when I suggested this past February that we reach out to RuPaul’s Drag Race to find a way to promote that’s been a beloved queer franchise on that show to be told by Marvel that they wouldn’t want to alienate certain audiences. It is wrong for their publicity Department to list homosexuality as a hot-button issue to avoid alongside school shootings, the Gaza conflict, and abortion. It is wrong for Marvel execs to foster inappropriate professional relationships with the artists I mentioned prior so as to push others out of the creative process who are not like them based on their identities. It is wrong for these two same individuals to write off an interracial relationship between Bishop and another white character as creepy, and something that belongs on ‘Skinemax.’ Of course, these two individuals did not have any issues with far racier moments in Season 1 involving white characters and, what I want to point out here, is these ‘Anonymous Scoops’ that keep on using the word ‘creepy,’ I heard that term from these individuals multiple times,” DeMayo said.

“Ultimately, the last straw for me was when I got to Atlanta to work on Blade, and I saw others being treated like me. Being told that someone needed to crack the whip around here. Crack the whip, in Atlanta, Georgia, at Tyler Perry Studios, which were formerly barracks during the Civil War. Now, after witnessing this and far worse incidences that I’m not yet prepared to talk about on Blade, I relayed my concerns to Marvel on September 6, 2022, hoping to work with them to do better urging them to reflect on the biases that we all have. In return I was removed from the project in the middle of moving to Atlanta for production and then had my role on Season 2 of X-Men ’97 aggressively marginalized, despite the integrity of my work in Season 1,” DeMayo said.

You can view the full statement in the video. We will make sure to update if Disney or Marvel responds.