Earlier this week, the entertainment industry was rocked when Disney announced 1,000 layoffs. Among those affected was Marvel Studios, whose visual development team going from 13-15 people to just a handful. This team’s spent decades creating how characters look onscreen and typically has their work collected in big, expansive art books.
A recent Polygon report from several (now ex-) staffers explores the visdev team’s history at Marvel. One former artist, speaking under anonymity, said the group existed because Kevin Feige “had a particular vision of how things should be translated.” The claim was backed up by Moon Knight and Captain America 4 artist Michael Uwendi. In his words, the team would get to design characters and create visuals that inspired movies, often without looking at a script beforehand. As fans of the comics, he said the team knew “how to push and pull while keeping it fan-friendly.”
Because of that specificity, they weren’t always popular with other departments. “[It wasn’t] like a rivalry,” the first source stressed, “but some sort of politics went on in these departments.” (Another source noted the costume department as one of many that “didn’t like having us around.”)
the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it https://t.co/94sLrfojOj pic.twitter.com/llKhz5pO61
— Wesley Burt (@wesburt) April 15, 2026
With an in-house development team, Marvel Studios developed a house style that became recognizable by longtime fans. Now that the team’s been broken up, Uwandi’s worried about what that’ll mean for future projects in terms of cohesion, not to mention team synergy. When a team in any industry is laid off, the biggest casualty is institutional knowledge and camaraderie born from collaboration.
To Uwandi, these layoffs are “shortsighted.” But are they due to AI? He wouldn’t be surprised, and neither would another artist with more recent Marvel work to their name. That person alleged other departments at Marvel Studios were using the controversial technology, including costume and art designers. (Not the visdev team, apparently.) But a third anonymous former member argued that wouldn’t be the case, and that Marvel plans to rehire its cut artists “on a freelance basis.”
You can read the full reporting here.
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