Marvel's X-Men '97 Season 2 "Ups the Ante"
"It's pretty intense what happens," series co-composer Taylor Newton Stewart teases of X-Men '97 season 2.
[Warning: This article contains spoilers for X-Men '97.] Midway through its 10-episode first season, Marvel Animation's X-Men '97 is at a turning point. What started with a faithful homage to '90s nostalgia got a real-world wake up call in Wednesday's episode 5, which saw a pack of Homo superior-hunting Wild Sentinels attack and decimate the mutant nation of Genosha. By the end of the heart-wrenching episode, titled "Remember It," Gambit (A.J. LoCascio), Madelyne Pryor (Jennifer Hale), and X-Men leader Magneto (Matthew Waterson) were among the casualties of a mass mutant extermination event.
Marvel Studios has already renewed X-Men '97 for a second season, and future episodes will "up the ante" even more, according to series co-composer Taylor Newton Stewart.
"We're working on season two. But we haven't started yet. I know a little bit of the storylines and characters," Stewart, one half of the Newton Brothers, told The Direct. "It's always upping the ante. I mean, it's pretty intense what happens. Yeah, immediately when I was told, I was just like, 'Oh my gosh, what's happening? This is incredible.' So, just as a fan alone, I am very excited."
Across its first five episodes, Marvel's revival of X-Men: The Animated Series has adapted versions of such classic '80s X-Men comic book storylines like Lifedeath and Inferno, and 2001's E is for Extinction.
Brad Winderbaum, head of streaming, television, and animation at Marvel Studios and executive producer for X-Men '97, recently told ComicBook that coming episodes would continue to pull inspiration from Chris Claremont's definitive Uncanny X-Men run up through Grant Morrison's New X-Men.
"Just like the original series that was drafting so heavily from Chris Claremont's work, we're continuing that. We're looking at that late '70s, mid '70s to early '90s kind of era," Winderbaum said. "We do start to play outside of the Chris Claremont sandbox a little bit into the '90s, almost getting to Grant Morrison. But it's definitely just like the OG series, it's drafting from the stories from the books."
New episodes of Marvel's X-Men '97 are streaming Wednesdays on Disney+.