Marvel Animation has set X-Men ’97 Season 2 for a Disney+ launch on Tuesday, July 1, 2026, with the studio screening the first four episodes for critics this week and quietly drawing some of the sharpest review notices of any animated property the company has put on streaming since the original 2024 season.
The 10-episode season picks up the cliffhanger from the 2024 finale by splitting the X-Men across three distinct time periods. Most of the team lands in 3000 AD, Bishop and Forge stay rooted in 1997 to orchestrate a rescue, and a smaller subset is shuttled into a far-future dystopia where the franchise’s ancient mutant villain has already taken root. ComicBook.com, which screened the first four episodes, reported a 4-out-of-5 verdict, calling the Apocalypse arc “superior” to the 2016 live-action take and praising Ross Marquand’s villain work for landing without the moral fence-sitting the magazine attributed to recent MCU theatrical efforts.
The new season also marks the first full release since Marvel Animation publicly contested creative control with the show’s creator Beau De Mayo, whose Disney departure in 2024 dominated trade coverage at the time. Marvel kept his executive producer credit and built the second-season writers’ room around longtime franchise hands. TVLine reported the back-half episodes that critics have not yet seen are expected to escalate the time-jumping format into a single converging endgame, in line with how the 2024 finale braided multiple character POVs.
The cast returns largely intact. Cal Dodd reprises Wolverine, Jennifer Hale plays Jean Grey, A.J. LoCascio voices Gambit’s spiritual successor arc, and George Buza brings Beast back into the rotation, while Marquand’s Apocalypse anchors both the past and future timelines as a single villain reconstructing his ancient sphere of influence across centuries. Marvel Animation has positioned the show as the centerpiece of its summer Disney+ slate, scheduling the season to roll out weekly through Labor Day rather than in a single binge drop.
The release also lands inside a broader push by the studio to deepen its preschool-to-adult animation funnel on Disney+. Marvel earlier this week dropped 11 new episodes of its TV-Y7 Iron Man and His Awesome Friends, as our coverage of that expansion reported, and the broader Disney pipeline benefits from the company’s still-unfolding deal to license Marvel characters into AI short-form video on OpenAI Sora, a $1 billion arrangement we reported on in December.
X-Men ’97 Season 1 was the most-streamed Marvel Animation title in Disney+’s history when it dropped in March 2024, by Nielsen’s measurement and Disney’s own quarterly disclosure language. Industry trackers are reading the early Season 2 reviews as confirmation that the property still has runway, particularly as the live-action X-Men reboot remains in long-development limbo at Marvel Studios. The studio has signaled a Season 3 order that would put the franchise into 2027 even before the first credits roll on Tuesday.
Marvel Animation has not yet released the full 10-episode run-of-show, but a 90-second teaser is expected to land mid-week. The series’ July 1 launch lines up with the studio’s broader summer Disney+ slate, which also includes new drops in the Spidey and His Amazing Friends preschool franchise and the back-half rollout of an adult-targeted Eyes of Wakanda anthology.
