Evangeline Lilly Slams Disney Over 1,000 Marvel Layoffs
Evangeline Lilly blasted Disney on Wednesday after 1,000 employees were laid off at Marvel, including 8 percent of the studio’s workforce. She said the cuts reached the artists behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe and accused the company of replacing creative work with AI.
Lilly called Disney’s decision “disgusting and horrible,” then pointed to the visual development team that helped shape Marvel’s look. For a studio that sells continuity as much as spectacle, losing that layer of artists is not a clean operational trim.
Andy Park on the layoff list
Lilly said she learned about the layoffs through social media and contacted Andy Park to ask, “Is this true? Is this really what's happening?” Park replied, “Yeah, it's true. I have been let go,” according to Lilly. Her response shifted the story from a corporate headcount reduction to a direct hit on the people who designed the characters and visuals fans recognize on screen.
She said Disney had let go of “the artists who brought the current Marvel Universe to life through their imagination and their genius.” In the same comments, she argued that “These were human creations, and they shouldn't be stolen by tech giants so that their robots can replicate them.”
Josh D'Amaro and streamlining
A memo from Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro did not cite AI as the reason for the cuts, instead describing them as part of a move to “streamline our operations.” That wording leaves the company defending a restructuring narrative while one of its most visible Marvel stars is publicly framing the layoffs as a creative and labor issue.
Lilly said she stood with the affected artists and closed her Instagram caption with “I salute you” and “I was there. I know what you did. I know how passionately you worked round the clock to make magic happen.” She also called on California lawmakers to protect artists’ work from artificial intelligence, turning a Disney personnel decision into a policy fight that now reaches well beyond Marvel.
Marvel artists and 2024
The dispute lands at a moment when Lilly had already said she would be stepping away from acting in 2024. That gives her criticism extra weight inside Marvel’s orbit: she is not speaking as a distant observer, but as someone who has worked inside the franchise and is now drawing a line around who gets credit for building it.
For Marvel, the immediate pressure is reputational. The studio has to absorb layoffs that hit its visual development team especially hard while a recognizable MCU player is arguing that the work behind those characters should not be handed over to software.
