People are still reeling from Disney’s mass layoffs last month, including Ant-Man‘s Evangeline Lilly. The Marvel actor who played the Wasp opposite Paul Rudd recently put out an Instagram video blasting the cuts and suggesting that the threat of generative AI looms large over the unexpected downsizing of Marvel’s visual development team.
“I reached out to my good friend Andy Park, who was the genius behind creating the original Wasp super-suit and the original Wasp concept drawings for the film Ant-Man and the Wasp, and just said, ‘Is this true? Is this really what’s happening?’” she said in a video posted on April 29 (via The Hollywood Reporter). “And he said, ‘Yeah, it’s true. I have been let go.’ And I can’t quite believe that, that Disney has let go of the artists who brought the Marvel Universe to life through their imagination and their genius.”
Marvel’s visual development team, which reportedly lost nearly 10 percent of its staff last month, is responsible for helping to create and maintain a unified identity for the MCU across movies, television, and other media. It employs concept artists and other specialists to generate designs and create a “house style” of iconic looks for movies that go on to generate billions in box office and streaming revenue.
Park was one of its veterans, and had been working on projects dating back to the original Captain America movie in 2011. “The people who invented these characters, who designed them in the first place, are now being replaced by AI,” Lilly alleged. “AI that will take their designs and take what those artists created and use it to create iterations of that.”
Disney had previously hashed out a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to work on AI-generated videos using its licensed IP and was reportedly caught completely off-guard when the tech company randomly shuttered its money-losing Sora slop-sharing platform experiment. But the company is reportedly still pursuing AI initiatives with other potential business partners, leaving creatives to worry about being losing their jobs and the slopificaiton of one of the biggest brands in Hollywood.
“This [visual development team] was something that Kevin [Feige] really wanted because, being a comic book fan, [he had] a particular vision of how things should be translated,” one former employee told Polygon last month. “This team was very specific, and we were often told that other departments don’t like having this team on—not like a rivalry, but some sort of politics [were] going on in between these different departments.”