After months of radio silence, former X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo has finally fulfilled his previous promise to provide fans with more details regarding his sudden firing from Marvel Studios – and according to him, the entire decision was nothing more than a pure, Disney-branded act of retaliation.
The saga of DeMayo’s firing first began in March 2024, when just day ahead of X-Men ’97‘s premiere, he was let go from his position and subsequently stripped of his productions credits for the show’s second season, of which he had already written a sizeable portion.
At the time, the showrunner implied that his new unemployment status was related to his sharing of a fan art piece, as drawn by New York City-based artist Jn’eyde, depicting him in a risqué Cyclops cosplay.
However, he announced he would be taking “a step back from social media” before divulging any specific information.
Offering a response to DeMayo via a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter, an official Marvel spokesperson pushed back against his suggestion, in turn asserting that “Mr. DeMayo was terminated in March 2024 following an internal investigation.”
“Given the egregious nature of the findings, we severed ties with him immediately,” they added, likewise declining to explain their side of the story, “and he has no further affiliation with Marvel.”
But in a third twist to the story, THR’s Aaron Couch and Borys Kit later reported that, per their alleged sources, the showrunner’s firing was the result of an agreement that had been “reached between the two parties over the issue of tweeting about the show, something that DeMayo had continued to occasionally do.”
“In light of the breeches, his credit for season two was removed,” they explained. “While no details of the cause of the termination or the internal reviews have surfaced. Sources say it involved sexual misconduct.”
From there, both DeMayo and Disney go dark on the topic, with neither party providing any updates for the next few months – that was until today, when without fanfare DeMayo uploaded a video aptly titled ‘Marvel-Disney Statement’ to his personal YouTube channel.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: DeMayo deleted the video while this article was being edited. As such, this transcript is the only record of its content that BIC is currently aware of.]
Beginning by explaining that his recent absence had been the result of him taking time away to consult with his legal team, the former Moon Knight and Blade writer then declared that “these allegations of egregious misconduct are false”, their spread being the result of “a smear campaign 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.”
“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,” said DeMayo. “You maybe heard some of these, the ‘I’ve heard rumbling and whispers about Beau’. Now back when I was at high school we called this
gossip. Unlike then, today, luckily, I have a legal team who has forensic investigators tracking these attacks, scoops and leak so that we can hold those responsible for defamation, harassment, and for inciting outright criminal threats of violence.”
“Now, my lawyer told Deadline that this is Disney and Marvel’s standard playbook, that they have done this to other artists like me. With me, it’s ‘Look at his Instagram, doesn’t he look thirsty? Isn’t he a narcissistic maniac? Isn’t it too vulgar, too sexual? This isn’t someone celebrating their hard work or their journey in overcoming years of internalized racism and homophobia to finally become comfortable in their own skin! No, this is something shameful. This is smoke for a larger fire of predatory behavior’. Usually, grace and empathy are the best response to conflict and adversity. If you think about it, that’s what X-Men ’97 Season 1 was all about. But what’s happening with Marvel what’s been going on here, is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in this industry.”
Following a brief venting of his general feelings of frustration and exhaustion towards the entire situation, the showrunner then moved to recall the history of his issues with Disney, which purportedly had their roots planted on the day he joined Marvel Studios.
“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. 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 them and just generally be written off as a diversity hire who didn’t earn the job. 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 flick crew members to undermine me, create a humiliating environment where people felt 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. 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 Clairemont.
“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. Now, in return, these individuals would then attempt to sabotage me on 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 hurts, was 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.”
Revealing his above insight to be just a preamble to his actual response, he explained to his viewers that he would next “try to break it down as simply as I can while playing within the parameters of some NDAs that my lawyer and I are still working out”.
“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.”
“It is wrong for a Marvel exec to roll her 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 an I look nothing alike. “
“And it is wrong when I suggested this past February that we reach out to RuPaul’s Drag Race to find a way to promote with 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 artist 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 from these individuals multiple times.”
“It is wrong for this lead artist to relay to me at a company barbecue in 2021 that her husband felt that I ‘must get a lot of dick’ based upon how I look. It is wrong to paint me as a nightmare for advocating for more representation for characters like Storm and Bishop and more. And if you want to know why they’re coming at me so hard, why they’re risking basically just lying to you, it is because this is not even the half of it. 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 6th, 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 despite the integrity of my work in Season 1. And this is going to be very important because the quality of my work on X-Men ’97 has been spoken about by Marvel several times, like [Marvel Studios Head of Streaming, Television, and Animation] Brad Winderbaum’s March 15th interview with Entertainment Weekly following my exit from the show. It happened again on May 17th, also in EW when Winderbaum insisted that they were following my blueprint and my vision for Season 2.”
“Now, this raises a question. If the all these rumors, and this pattern of egregious misconduct were true, why would you have the head of Marvel TV making such statements to the press? When fans reacted badly to me being dismissed, when they began demanding me back, why not say all of this then? But when I spoke out about the Emmys and them stripping me of my Season 2 credits based upon a gay pride post, then all these narratives appear and, actually, if I really think about it, the Season 2 credit issue and stripping is a perfect example of the type of manipulative dishonesty they’re going for
here.”
“Disney has alleged that I breached my exit agreement several times. ‘Breaches’, much like ‘egregious’, sounds so bad, so
serious. I must have done something terrible after my exit to make them strip me of my credits. But here’s what
really happened: The exit agreement which they forced me to sign, coerced me to sign under threat of removing all of my
credits, lacked certain civil rights protections that California law requires, thus rendering it invalid. My legal team notified them of this but still Marvel persisted, for months, to harass and stalk my social media looking for any ammo possible to attack me.”
“Now, what were these breaches though, that they’re actually referencing? It was me talking to you, the fans about Pulse [the nightclub that was sadly targeted by an explicitly anti-gay mass shooter in June 2016] after Episode 5 on Twitter and how much of an influence it was on the vision of the series. It was me at a bar speaking at a screening event talking about how I had outlined five seasons of the show. It was me thanking fans on Twitter and Instagram for their support, highlighting cast and crew speaking positively about Marvel, post fan art. These were the ‘offensive breaches’. And somehow they justify this campaign to erase me from the show I created, with Marvel going so far as to actively blacklist me from third-party, non-Disney Comic-Con panels this past summer, all the way to denying the invites and blocking me from attending award shows like the Emmys, which we’ve talked about.”
“And as I go through all this, I really have to wonder just how at when Season 1 managed to turn out as well as it
did and then I think about the crew. The overwhelming majority of the crew of X-Men ’97 are some of the most talented
kindhearted people I have ever met. They’re insanely talented and I still feel so honored that they trusted me in my vision and worked so hard to make it a reality despite Marvel and others on the crew who would have had us deliver something wholly sub-parr for the sake of their egos. I have received a lot of messages from them, a lot of messages of support
and love, and they have gotten me through some really dark times, the dark times I was talking about earlier. But I was also infuriated to learn that Marvel publicity. internally, has been actively working to prevent them from speaking about their positive work experiences with me, going so far as to interrupt interviews they are giving to sites like IGN and forcing them to re-record answers that erase me or mitigate my contributions. They’ve been told not to give Beau too much credit or to not go overboard with how influential Bo was on this series – and when Marvel tells you to do something, it comes with the implied threat of what will happen if you don’t, and if the crew had any doubts they just needed to look at what happened and what is happening with me right now.”
“But actually, what concerns me the most out of these messages I have received is the fact that the X-Men ’97 crew
are are still being abused just like I was abused with impossible pipeline demands that endanger their health and safety, and studio politics that create a toxic environment that turns individuals against one another and stokes paranoia to ensure
compliance. These people are tired they’re scared, some of them are broken, and they’ve been reaching out to me for
help. And we’ve seen VFX artists try to raise awareness about the near criminal working condition at Marvel – nothing
has changed. I had editors falling asleep at the wheel, I had individuals rapidly losing weight, having mental breakdowns.
And when I reached out to Marvel about these safety issues, when I emailed them, the response I got was the same response I got when I reported prejudicial conduct – more retaliation.”
“In the end, the offenses Marvel and others have leaked are designed to distract you from what really offended them, whic was someone like me dared to speak truth to people like them. They wanted me to be the black stamp of approval on this project, I declined. They wanted to erase aspects of my personality that clashed or proved inconvenient with the misguided
narratives they want wanted to establish, I declined. They tried to intimidate me with both explicit and implied threats, I
was not intimidated. Everything they have done since then has been designed not just to silence me and smear me but to crush me and to remind me to know my role.”
His main frustrations finally aired, DeMayo then turned to answer the question of “What’s next?’, admitting that while it felt “so tempting to just drop all the names and receipts that I have online,” he would prefer “to present this evidence to Disney and Marvel and work with them so that those responsible are able to receive what I was not: a full and fair investigation, away from the public eye, one that is confidential and that resembles some form of just ethical due process. Disney, Marvel, my team and I have already started your investigation. I have the receipts and the eyewitnesses so long as you stop coercing them to lie. You can keep attacking me with lies and misinformation, and we can become the ugliest, most annoying version of that back and forth tennis ball meme, or you can start acting like a studio that is worthy of a show like X-Men ’97.”
Drawing his thoughts to a close, the show runner ultimately noted that there was one last thing “that bears mentioning,” which was that “across three projects and in six years of working for Marvel, I was never once spoken to, disciplined, warned by HR. That is until 4 days after I sent a text message to a Marvel employee saying that I no longer felt safe at the
at the studio as a gay black man.
“This conversation with HR, 4 days after I sent that text, was the same conversation where I was dismissed,” he ultiamtely concluded. “Thank you for listening.”
At current, neither Disney nor Marvel have yet offered a public response to DeMayo’s video.
