It was always too good to be true. Almost a year after initially being announced, the planned animated series based on Marvel’s Deadpool, written, produced, and run by Donald and Stephen Glover on FX, looks to be dead for the moment. THR is reporting that the Glover brothers and FX have exited the project citing creative differences, according to a statement issued by FX. It is not yet known if the project is completely dead or is simply being set-up elsewhere. My money would be on the latter option.

There is an up-side here. Though FX will no longer be the home for Deadpool, the deal with Marvel allows them to continue carrying Legion, what may still be the best of the Marvel TV projects thus far. The second season of Noah Hawley‘s endlessly inventive and genuinely moving adaptation of the Marvel title is about to debut on FX and I hope there’s a lot more of the show to come. Otherwise, it would seem like the influence of the pending Disney-Fox deal has some hand in this development, and THR speculates that it might have something to do with Disney CEO Bob Iger‘s recent announcement that an anticipated Disney streaming service would feature an original Marvel TV series as well as the full slate of Marvel movies. The animated Deadpool series could very well be that proposed project.

It’s unfortunate that the series won’t necessarily bear the mark of Glover’s increasingly confident style. Atlanta Robbin’ Season is already the best season of TV that’s arrived this year, and he has inarguably been the highlight of the Solo marketing campaign thus far. Without Glover, the promise of an underlying sense of substance and bold wit evaporates from the animated Deadpool project, which is not to say that someone talented couldn’t revamp it successfully from a different perspective. We’ll have to see, but for now, Deadpool 2 and the inevitable Deadpool 3 are the only slated projects to feature the Merc with a Mouth.