X-Men ‘97 screenwriter goes scorched earth on Kevin Feige and Marvel

Loading Twitter/X Embed...
If tweet fails to load, click here.

quote:

---

To those asking why I’m not so hard on #Superman, the answer is I’ve never worked with Gunn or DC.

Like Matt Shankman and the writers of #fantasticfour, I’ve sat in the “creative meetings” at
@MarvelStudios
. They’re horrible.

You basically sit in a room with Kevin Feige and Lou D’Esposito and try to pitch your movie while also realizing that Kevin just wants you to dictate his rushed thoughts. Victoria used to be in these but Kevin and Lou had so mistreated her that in one of my #Blade meetings she just showed up with sugar cookies she’d bake to help improve morale.

You’re even told NOT to try to pitch ideas from the comics because Lou isn’t a big comic guy and it’ll turn him off.

You sit and talk about craft and story and characters only to have Kevin and Lou say “yeah well, all we need to do is make sure it’s fun” and etc etc.

There’s no spark. There’s no vision. 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. This is why
@robertliefeld
isn’t just some bitter old man. Talking about the comic book writers is met with open contempt. I had to fight to get the Lewalds involved on #xmen97 and even then the dismissive news with which Dana Vasquez-Eberhart spoke about them, basically telling me the OG creators were meant to be seen not heard to appease fans. I wanted to cowrite an ep with them and that was Dana’s response. I even remember wanting to talk to Chris Claremont and being shut down, or wanting Joe Madureira to do posters, just as I was scolded for being too friendly with fans, or coming off too much as one.

This was in a meeting where I was pitching that we could use #Blade as a chance to pick up the dangling threads from #DrStrange when it came to Wanda and the Darkhold. We could use Varney and the Darkhold cultists.

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. 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.

To Kevin’s credit, he liked the idea, as well as my pitch that magic is to Blade what snakes are to Indiana Jones: he hates magic. But then Lou felt it was too comic book while Mahershala bumped on there being magic in the film tonally. And then I watched as them and Nate Moore picked it apart and we were off to a new draft.

It’s a broken machine, and so I can see where Matt and his team probably had great ideas only for Marvel’s arrogance to destroy them.

---