In Another World, ‘X-Men 97’ Would Have Given The MCU Its X-Men Architect

Having just finished watching this week’s X-Men 97, the penultimate episode before next week’s finale, it has, not surprisingly, not lost a single step, full of incredible action and great character moments as it has been pretty much every single week.

I have called X-Men 97 one of the best Marvel projects…ever, even including pre-MCU X-Men offerings, and it looks like I’m going to get to stick by that until the end. It seems like an easy decision to make to take lessons learned from just how well this is going, and apply it to what will be the upcoming insertion of the X-Men into the MCU, once the Deadpool crossover bits are done. Namely, you’d probably hire the guy to make that happen.

But uh, problem there.

That guy is Beau DeMayo, the creator of X-Men 97 who was fired just weeks before the show premiered, and was not allowed to give official interviews or be used in promotion for the show (though he has talked about it constantly on his personal social media). He will also not be back for a second season and as you can see, it feels essentially impossible that if he was fired this abruptly, that he could be moved over to live-action X-Men in the future even though that’s very much what ‘97 indicates would be a good decision.

We cannot say this is the “wrong” call because we have to separate creative genius from whatever the situation was that got DeMayo fired, which we simply do not know. There is little point in speculating, and we only have a history of some past Witcher writers seemingly being upset with him during his time there (he was the one who said they did not appreciate the source material when writing that series). You can’t really say “are you kidding? The show is great, bring him back!” without actually knowing what happened here. And neither Disney nor DeMayo have said. Nor has anything credible been leaked about the situation.

But it is a deeply unfortunate circumstance. While DeMayo is certainly not the only reason X-Men 97 is as good as it is, he is the creator of the series. He also wrote or co-wrote at least 6 of the 10 episodes, including solo writing Episode 5, Remember It, one of the best thirty minutes of Marvel content ever. The directors could carry over, as that’s not DeMayo, but instead Jake Castorena, Chase Conley and Emi Yonemura, who have directed all the episodes between them.

A normal trajectory would have had DeMayo coming back for multiple seasons in between working with Marvel to figure out how to translate this ‘97 magic into the full return of the live-action X-Men in the MCU. But given what’s happened, whatever it was, that seems impossible, and Marvel is going to have to figure it out on their own.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.