After more than two years away, Marvel Animation's most acclaimed small-screen revival is finally back. X-Men '97 Season 2 lands on Disney+ today, July 1, 2026, and it does not ease the team back in gently. The mutant heroes who closed Season 1 staring down catastrophe are now flung across thousands of years of history, and the show drops three episodes at once to set the board.
What Happened
Disney+ released the first three installments of X-Men '97 Season 2 simultaneously: "Days of Past Future," "A Force To Be Reckoned With," and "Rise of Apocalypse – Part 1." The premiere picks up the cliffhanger that ended the first season, when a temporal disaster scattered the X-Men through time and left their future hanging in the balance. Rather than a tidy reunion, the team wakes up separated across three different eras and has to claw its way back to the present.
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The scattering is specific and deliberate. Professor Xavier, Magneto, Rogue, Nightcrawler, and Beast find themselves in Ancient Egypt around 3000 B.C.; Cyclops and Jean Grey are stranded in the year 3960, alongside grown-up versions of their own children; Bishop and Forge are stuck in the 1990s, racing to pull everyone home; and Storm, Wolverine, and Morph are, at least at first, simply unaccounted for. Tying the eras together is the ancient mutant Apocalypse, also known as En Sabah Nur, the villain teased at the very end of Season 1 and voiced this year by Ross Marquand, who also plays Professor X.
The nine-episode season brings back the familiar voice cast, including Ray Chase as Cyclops, Jennifer Hale as Jean Grey, Alison Sealy-Smith as Storm, Cal Dodd as Wolverine, J. P. Karliak as Morph, Lenore Zann as Rogue, George Buza as Beast, Matthew Waterson as Magneto, and Adrian Hough as Nightcrawler. Several of them, including Sealy-Smith, Dodd, Zann, and Buza, have now played these roles going all the way back to the original 1990s cartoon, which is a large part of why the revival lands the way it does.
Why It Matters
When X-Men '97 first arrived in 2024, it was a genuine surprise hit. A continuation of X-Men: The Animated Series that ran from 1992 to 1997, it could have coasted on nostalgia. Instead it drew some of the warmest reviews Marvel had earned in any medium for a while, balancing Saturday-morning energy with surprisingly heavy emotional beats and a serialized story that treated longtime fans as adults.
That makes Season 2 one of the more closely watched titles on Disney+ this summer. The series is executive produced by Marvel Studios' Brad Winderbaum, Kevin Feige, and Louis D'Esposito, alongside original Animated Series veterans Larry Houston and Eric and Julia Lewald, who came aboard as producers to keep the revival tethered to its roots. The team kept the hand-drawn 2D look of the 1990s show but modernized it, and dressed the cast in costumes inspired by Grant Morrison's New X-Men comics. The result is the rare legacy revival that feels, as supervising director Jake Castorena has put it, both fresh and familiar.
There is also a behind-the-scenes story worth noting. Original head writer Beau DeMayo, who shaped the revival's voice, departed the production in 2024, and What If...? writer Matthew Chauncey was brought in to oversee rewrites and steer the series forward. For a show this devoted to continuity, the handoff was a real test of whether the tone could survive a change at the top.
The Reaction
Anticipation has been building all year. Marvel dropped the Season 2 trailer on May 27, 2026, paired with a tribute poster that openly homages Frank Miller's iconic cover for Wolverine #1 from 1982. Fans immediately started dissecting frames for glimpses of new faces and the time-bending structure, and the marketing leaned hard into the promise that this season would go darker than the first.
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The show also got a high-profile launchpad. X-Men '97 Season 2 held a world premiere event at the Tribeca Festival in June, before its global Disney+ debut, signaling that Marvel sees this animated series as a marquee release rather than a niche offering. Cast members have spent the run-up teasing that the new season raises the stakes considerably, with one star describing it bluntly as very dark with a high body count. The lingering grief from the Season 1 finale, including the death of Gambit, is set to ripple through the entire run.
What's Next
After today's three-episode opener, X-Men '97 shifts to a weekly schedule. "Rise of Apocalypse – Part II" follows on July 8, "Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs" on July 15, and the season builds toward its finale on August 12. That cadence gives the time-scattered storyline room to breathe and lets each era's cliffhanger sit for a week, the way the best serialized animation has always worked.
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The roster is expanding, too. Season 2 is set to introduce or feature a deep bench of mutants, among them Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, Havok, Mariko, Polaris, Psylocke, Archangel, and Colossus, with the strike team X-Force entering the picture. Polaris in particular is reported to carry a pivotal arc affecting both the X-Men and X-Force. And fans worried about a long wait can relax a little: Marvel confirmed a third season back in 2024, so the franchise has a clear runway beyond this summer's chapter.
Closing Thoughts
What keeps pulling viewers back to the X-Men, decade after decade, is not really the spandex or the laser eyes. It is the metaphor underneath: a story about people feared for who they are, trying to build a future in a world that would rather they disappear. X-Men '97 works because it remembers that, even while it is throwing Wolverine into Ancient Egypt and stranding Cyclops in the far future.
There is something fitting about a show built on time travel arriving as a bridge between eras itself, carrying the voices and the spirit of a 1990s cartoon into a streaming landscape that barely existed when these characters last animated the airwaves. Whether Season 2 sticks the landing of its ambitious, fractured structure remains to be seen across the next six weeks. But for now, the mutants are back, the stakes are higher, and a generation that grew up with this team gets to watch it fight through history one more time.
한글 요약
마블 애니메이션의 화제작 엑스맨 '97 시즌 2가 7월 1일 디즈니+에 공개됐다. 첫 3개 에피소드가 동시 공개되며, 시즌 1 마지막의 시간 재난으로 엑스맨 팀이 기원전 3000년 고대 이집트, 서기 3960년 먼 미래, 그리고 1990년대로 뿔뿔이 흩어진 상태에서 이야기가 시작된다. 이들을 하나로 엮는 빌런은 시즌 1 말미에 예고된 고대 뮤턴트 '아포칼립스(엔 사바 누르)'로, 로스 마쿼드가 프로페서 X와 1인 2역으로 연기한다. 총 9부작이며 칼 도드(울버린), 제니퍼 헤일(진 그레이) 등 1990년대 원작부터 이어진 성우진이 대거 복귀했다.
2024년 시즌 1은 1992~1997년 원작 엑스맨 디 애니메이티드 시리즈의 정식 후속으로, 향수에 기대지 않고 진중한 서사와 호평을 동시에 잡아내며 깜짝 흥행했다. 시즌 2는 케빈 파이기, 브래드 윈더바움 등 마블 스튜디오 진영과 원작 베테랑 래리 휴스턴·루얼드 부부가 함께 제작을 맡았고, 1990년대 2D 작화를 현대적으로 다듬었다. 제작 도중 핵심 작가 보 드메이오가 하차하고 매슈 천시가 합류해 각본을 재정비한 점도 연속성을 중시하는 이 시리즈에는 중요한 변수였다.
5월 27일 공개된 예고편과 프랭크 밀러의 울버린 #1 표지를 오마주한 포스터로 기대가 한껏 달아올랐고, 6월 트라이베카 페스티벌에서 월드 프리미어를 가진 뒤 전 세계 동시 공개됐다. 7월 8일 4화, 7월 15일 5화를 거쳐 8월 12일 피날레까지 매주 한 편씩 공개된다. 세이버투스, 폴라리스, 사일록, 콜로서스와 엑스포스 등 새 얼굴이 대거 합류하며, 시즌 3도 이미 확정돼 있다. 시간을 넘나드는 이번 시즌이 그 야심 찬 구조를 끝까지 잘 마무리할지가 향후 6주간의 관전 포인트다.
참고/출처: Marvel.com, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, Wikipedia