Last week, Donald Glover sent a series of tweets confirming that his departure from Marvel's animated Deadpool series was not because he'd taken on too much work. "I wasn't too busy to work on Deadpool," he tweeted along with a number of pages from the now-abandoned script. Co-written with his brother Stephen Glover, the leaked script included a pretty savage burn on Marvel itself, with Deadpool musing about why his own animated series was canceled: "What? The Marvel stuff I said in it? All I said was Marvel was trying to sell toys to 7-year-old boys and 50-year-old pedophiles."
Now, in a series of tweets, Stephen Glover confirmed that the series also had an episode about Taylor Swift.
“There really was a Taylor Swift episode,” Stephen wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “It was HILARIOUS. And it definitely was the last straw lol.”
He then continued in a second tweet:
“Our show wasn’t too black. It wasn’t really that black at all. But we definitely wanted to give Rick and Morty a run for their money and I think we would have. Proud of the gang.”
Certainly, Donald and Stephen Glover's writing isn't afraid at pushing the envelope when it comes to depicting real celebrities. In its first season, Atlanta featured a black Justin Bieber.
Marvel hasn't said why, exactly, they parted ways on the animated series. A statement simply said that “due to creative differences, FX, Donald Glover, Stephen Glover, and Marvel Television have agreed to part ways on Marvel’s Deadpool animated series. FX will no longer be involved with the project.”
Since that didn't work out, maybe Atlanta could use its own version of Taylor Swift.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
