X-Men: Kevin Feige’s Approach to Mutants Slammed by ’97 Creator

X-Men ’97 creator Beau DeMayo, who was fired by Marvel Studios in March 2024, held nothing back in recent social media posts that criticized studio president Kevin Feige‘s handling of the titular mutant team in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

What did Beau DeMayo have to say about Kevin Feige’s handling of the X-Men?

In a pair of posts on X, DeMayo slammed how Feige has so far utilized the X-Men in the MCU. He began by explaining how he believes the X-Men mythos needs to be treated when bringing them to film and television, writing, “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.”

DeMayo then listed off several reasons why Marvel Studios and Feige have failed at that, beginning with how the MCU’s first introduction to the X-Men was through 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.”

The X-Men ’97 creator also took issue with Marvel bringing back both Patrick Stewart’s Professor X for a “weird nostalgia cameo” in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where he got “brutally murdered… AGAIN,” and Kelsey Grammer’s Beast (“from THE WORST X-MEN movie ever made”) in The Marvels, where he met Monica Rambeau, someone he has “ZERO history” with in the comics.

“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?” DeMayo pitched, likely alluding to how Rogue and Carol have a history in the comics, as the former absorbed the latter’s psyche and Kree powers.

DeMayo also found Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel’s first billion-dollar blockbuster in three years, to be a lazy farewell to Fox’s X-Men Universe, taking further issue with the studio making Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine feel like yet again the face of the X-Men. As for Captain America: Brave New World, which featured the MCU debut of adamantium, DeMayo called it “a contrived MacGuffin plot … that has amounted to nothing, and begs timeline questions where I guess Ms Marvel is a mutant before Wolverine entered Weapon X.”

While an X-Men reboot with Jake Schreier as director is in development, Marvel is bringing back the original actors from Fox’s first X-Men trilogy for Avengers: Doomsday, which DeMayo stated is being done solely to “manufacture artificial interest and distract from Kevin and [Marvel Studios’] decade long flailing of frequent failures.”

He added, “Kevin is introducing new concepts like adamantium and mutant Ms Marvel while simultaneously recycling old Fox characters all before telling us they’re going to reboot everything anyways? Like, what the fuck?”

DeMayo also attempted to get ahead of anyone calling him bitter just because Marvel fired him before X-Men ’97 had even premiered, writing, “And before you think I’m being egotistical, I highlight this to say, under my leadership and vision, my team and I created an project that resonated with the MCU’s core audience in a way that Kevin and his Parliament have so far failed to do in over a decade. Instead of looking at what my team and I did and learning to replicate our focus on canon and deep character work, they smeared me, tactically threatened the crew not to speak out while continuing to still abuse them, and have done everything to act like [X-Men ’97] wasn’t a hit.”

He continued, “I have yet to see anything from Kevin and Marvel that shows that they respect how much fans have invested in these characters. Now, will this change? I hope so. As I said, I have no faith…yet [in the MCU’s Mutant Saga].”

Check out DeMayo’s full posts on X below:

The 20th Century Fox X-Men movies and X-Men ’97 are available to stream on Disney+.

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Deadpool and Wolverine

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Kevin Feige

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X-Men 97