Insight: X-Men ’97’s Beau DeMayo Declares War Against Disney For Termination From Emmy-Nominated Series
There’s a scene in the film The Social Network where where Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) sits down to grab dinner with Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and Christy Lee (Brenda Song) and Sean goes on to say (and I’m paraphrasing) “you can live your life like the Dalai Lama, but they’ll make shit up because they don’t want you, they want your idea”.
Now I’m not saying that’s exactly what’s happening here, but how many high-profile terminations is Disney going to take part in with its creative talent before enough is enough and someone starts to see a pattern here? In animation alone I’ve been told by creatives off-the-record that the company is notoriously difficult to deal with in producing their projects and Gina Carano is literally embroiled in a lawsuit with Lucasfilm/Disney overall wrongful termination over controversial posts she had posted on X.com. Now, X-Men ’97 creator Beau DeMayo could be gearing up for similar legal action.
It was odd-timing that Beau was terminated just before X-Men ’97 had premiered but not before the creator had finished up writing of the show’s first two seasons, thereby shredding any hope that Beau would take part in any of the marketing activities leading up to and since the season one finale had premiered on Disney+. Beau has since been left off of the invitation to attend the Emmys of which X-Men ’97 has been nominated for. Most recently, the character assassination of Beau continued as he was told that he would no longer be credited in the upcoming second season of X-Men ’97 after he had regrammed Cyclops fan-art. Furthermore, Disney retaliated noting that they had fired Beau DeMayo back in March after an internal review of allegations of sexual misconduct, however, no victims have publically come forward and Beau is planning on having his lawyers fight these charges. Jeff Sneider has since come in with a full story on Beau with claims that the creator had been known to grope an assistant multiple times and sent nude photos of himself in hero poses to his other co-workers. All serious charges, if true, but again no legal charges against Beau for sexual harassment have been filed at the time of this writing and so far Jeff is only providing hearsay evidence in his report.
Lest we forget a similar outcome for former creator of Disney+/Hulu’s Solar Opposites Justin Roiland when domestic assault charges were filed against the creator only to come to fruition that Justin was completely innocent of any wrongdoing and even since that went down, there had been no additional legal charges or accusations against him since his termination. In both Beau and Justin’s cases, all evidentiary accusations are so far hearsay at best (and I don’t buy any so called “DMs” between unverified accounts as proof, with constant AI and Photoshop manipulation, you can’t really buy that stuff anymore).
As for X-Men ’97, it’s all systems go for Disney+’s animated series with Matthew Chauncey being tapped to replace Beau DeMayo as the lead writer for the show’s third season which is currently in development at the moment.
Update 9/5: Beau is only going to reveal exclusive details of his side of the story on his OnlyFans.
Do we know if Hulu will be the only entity to have the dub, or if it will be on other platforms, too? The show in general is definitely going to be on multiple platforms.