X-Men ’97 creator Beau DeMayo does not mince words about his experience at Marvel Studios in a post shared on his social media. According to DeMayo, the pitch process for film projects is a nightmare, with his original idea for Mahershala Ali’s Blade movie getting ripped to shreds by higher-ups who don’t want their comic book movies to be too “comic booky.” In his scathing post, DeMayo describes Marvel as a “slaughterhouse factory” where you watch fresh meat get spoiled as it slowly makes its way through an assembly of mediocrity. Ouch!
“There’s no spark. There’s no vision,” DeMayo says in his Twitter post. “Marvel is a slaughterhouse factory where you watch fresh meat get spoiled as it slowly makes its way through the assembly gears of mediocre thinking and this weird hatred for their own product.”
DeMayo recalls how he wanted to collaborate with the original X-Men creators for X-Men ’97. Still, the studio preferred that those individuals be there only for their namesake to appease fans. He defends Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld’s gripes with the studio and details his Blade pitch, which involved the Daywalker encountering vampire magic with ties to Doctor Strange.
“One of my drafts opened with Deacon Frost tricking some British explorers to trek up to Mount Wundagore where he does blood magic to reveal the vampire spell used by Varney and his followers during the days of Kull,” DeMayo wrote in his post. “It’d start trying some of these threads together. I even had the same monsters from Dr Strange show up to kill the explorers before Deacon reveals he’s a vampire and kills them (up until that point he’d been covered against the cold and daylight). This was set before Dr Strange 2 so a lot of the stuff played ironically, while also having Frost give us more details about Chthon, who we only glimpsed in Dr2.”
Read DeMayo’s tweet in full below:
Are things at Marvel Studios as terrible as Beau DeMayo makes them seem? What do you think about his pitch for Mahershala Ali’s Blade? Is it antithetical to not want your comic book movies to be too much like the comics they’re inspired by? I have so many questions.
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