New Warriors' Showrunner Reveals The Shocking Reason It Was Canceled

With a few notable exceptions, Disney holds its Marvel Television brand in one basket: Disney+. It didn't used to be that way. It wasn't so long ago that there was a shared "Defenders" universe on Netflix, "The Gifted" aired on Fox, and there was even a crossover between the Hulu series "Runaways" and Freeform's "Cloak & Dagger."

As of now, absolutely none of those shows exist — thanks in no small part to the merger between Disney and 20th Century Fox. There are shows that never even made it to air in the first place within recent Marvel memory: "Ghost Rider," "Tigra & Dazzler," and even a "Howard the Duck" series all spring to mind.

And then there's another series fans were excited about, one that even shot a pilot that was ultimately rejected: the Squirrel Girl-starring, half-hour sitcom series "New Warriors." The show, which was set to air on Freeform, never saw the light of day and, while some assumed this was a result of the merger, it seems like there was another, far more upsetting reason why "New Warriors" was allegedly snuffed out before release.

"New Warriors" was a show designed to focus on the sub-tier heroes within the Marvel Universe, teams like the Great Lake Avengers, who often get forgotten in the grand scheme of the larger Marvel Universe. Squirrel Girl, who would've led the team, was a much more known quantity in the late 2010s thanks to the comic book series "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl" created by Ryan North and Erica Henderson.

Despite a positive response to the pilot from test audiences, Freeform pulled the plug on "New Warriors" in 2018. In a now-deleted tweet from showrunner Kevin Biegel, we got a shocking explanation for the show's disappearance.

"There's a show we wrote a few years ago," tweeted Biegel. "It was very proudly gay. A SINGULAR power that be killed the show. Because it was too gay. A rich, straight, Brentwood turd. He got fired for being vile at this company."

That's not the only thing Biegel tweeted on September 8, only to delete later. The showrunner also specified that the person he was deriding was not former Marvel TV executive Jeph Loeb. "I have nights where I can't fall asleep because I get so mad we couldn't have characters say stuff like this," Biegel also tweeted, along with a section of "New Warriors script. The line reads simply, "Black. Queer. Powered."

How legitimate is this accusation? Hard to say, but it's worth noting that Milana Vayntrub, who was set to play Squirrel Girl, retweeted Biegel's statements as well as images of her as Squirrel Girl.