Marvel Just Lost Almost Its Entire Visual Development Team

A month into new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro’s tenure, he announced in a memo to the company earlier this week that around 1,000 jobs would be eliminated.

Among the divisions hit particularly hard by the cuts is a key group within Marvel Studios: The “Visual Development” team which is involved in the design of each of Marvel’s film and TV productions, and is particularly known for their ingenious translations of Marvel’s signature comic-book costumes into live-action that actual human beings can wear. (In years past, ScreenCrush has spoken to two members of Marvel’s visual development team: Ryan Meinerding and Andy Park.)

According to Forbes, Disney’s layoffs have hit Marvel “hard,” with the company “losing staff from both New York and Burbank, across most areas of the organization including film and tv production, comics, franchise, finance, and legal. That includes the nearly the entire Academy Award-winning visual development team at Marvel Studios.”

Among those affected: Concept artist and illustrator Wesley Burt, who tweeted “the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it.”

Forbes claims that Marvel retained “a skeleton crew of full time production staff remaining in place to coordinate the hiring of resources on a per-project basis.” In other words, they let go of salaried employees in the visual development division, and will instead rely on freelance artists where needed to help design future Marvel Cinematic Universe productions.

In announcing the company’s layoffs, D’Amaro wrote...

Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-class creativity and innovation our fans value and expect from Disney. Given the fast-moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs. As a result, we will be eliminating roles in some parts of the company and have begun notifying impacted employees.

Marvel’s next theatrical release, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, premieres in theaters on July 31. Avengers: Doomsday follows it to theaters on December 17.