In this piece of promotional behind-the-scenes content for X-Men ’97, returning cast and crew and new players in the production alike make an appeal to nostalgic fandom, promising a next-day continuation of the series. The show is characterized as a triumphant and loving homecoming for creators and fans. What you don’t see in this promo, or indeed throughout the Marvel Studios Assembled documentary from which it was excerpted, is any sign of showrunner Beau DeMayo, who exited the series under opaque circumstances just weeks before the show premiered.

What interests me about this isn’t the precise rumours that arise in the information vacuum left by DeMayo and Marvel, nor their subsequent and (as of this writing) ongoing legal dispute. What I’m curious about here are the echoes of Zack Snyder’s exit from 2017’s Justice League and the larger project of the DCEU. Both DeMayo and Snyder qualify as what Suzanne Scott calls the fanboy auteur: geeky lovers of source material seeking to make “visionary” statements through and due to their deep adoration. The fanboy auteur is a rhetorical frame constructed by transmedia complexes to reify the validity of an adaptation, but within it exists a dialectical tension between the requirements of the story and the maintenance of the brand. The differences between how the two studios (Marvel and DC) fought for or controlled the narrative in the wake of ejecting creative leadership speaks volumes on the transformation of the fanboy auteur in contemporary transmedia. When Justice League flopped, DC and parent company Warners were able to point to Snyder’s failing vision as the issue. However, their brand maintenance fell short of narrative control, and a problematic and ultimately successful #SnyderCut movement followed.

This has, thus far, been less of an issue for Marvel and parent company Disney. When you control the platform, as Marvel does with Disney+, you can easily excise unfavourable elements, and the Assembled documentary still presents X-Men ’97 as the product of an aggregated fanboy auteurism. But imagine the documentary we might have seen with the inclusion of DeMayo, speaking both to the identity theming of the show and the BTS drama that demonstrates sanctioned fannish creation as complex, messy, and human. A transmedia complex can create a fanboy auteur by positioning them as a visionary adherent to source material, and it can, apparently, summarily delete a fanboy auteur as well.