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X-Men ’97 Season 2 is cooking with some sizzling hot grease, and Marvel fans are loving it. The sophomore season has already generated more hype than the first one, as the X-Men have gone hopping through time in an attempt to stop one of their greatest foes, Apocalypse, from ever rising to power, threatening the modern-day world (of the ’90s), and eventually sparking a war that engulfs the entire future. With Season 2 now half over (at the time of writing this), a lot of Marvel fans are now feeling like two seasons of this show aren’t nearly enough. There’s already been confirmation that X-Men ’97 Season 3 is happening, with indicators from those involved with the show that Season 4 and Season 5 could also be in the works.
That’s a lot of speculation, but what’s actually true? Now we’re finally getting a clear answer on how many seasons X-Men ’97 should last. Producers seem to have a clear vision for it; the question is, are fans behind the plan?
X-Men ’97 Producer Reveals How Many Seasons The Show Should Last
X-Men ’97 executive producer Larry Houston (the director of X-Men: The Animated Series) has been out making the rounds in the press, and he hasn’t been shy about sharing how long he thinks X-Men ’97 can and should last: “I would say, if they can at least match what I did [with the original series], five seasons, it would be great. Maybe six. But everything depends on the audience and how well-received the stories that they’re doing are.”
Houston cites his experience on X-Men: TAS as the best teacher. That series ran for five seasons, but there were substantial differences in how TV was done then, compared to now.
“With my original series, we had 13 episodes per season. Streaming is only like eight or nine, so their storytelling is more compressed than ours. We could stretch things out and let characterizations of situations breathe more than the streaming, it’s just more smaller. So if ‘X-Men ’97‘ could do something like at least match what we did for five seasons, that would allow a lot more stories to be explored. Because there’s been 24, 25 more years of other stories that I never touched, that this current ‘X-Men ’97’ production is exploring.”
Marvel Fans Want More Than 5 Seasons of X-Men ’97 (And They’re Letting Producers Know It)
Larry Houston’s comments are getting an impassioned response on social media, and there seems to be one overwhelming consensus: Fans want more X-Men ’97 than Larry Houston is putting down on the table. In the same spirit of the TV series Community, some fans want “10 seasons and a movie” before X-Men ’97 ends it run, which is actually doable on the Disney+ platform. An X-Men ’97 animated feature would certainly be an event that generates a lot of fan attention. Let’s definitely circle back to that idea.
Other fans seem to be falling into a closure range of time, similar to what Houston suggests, about 6 or 7 seasons of the show.
It does warrant mentioning that we are currently only in the second season of X-Men ’97, and that pacing is something to consider. The show flies through significant amounts of X-Men comic book in every episode; Season 1 arguably covered events that span from the late 1990s comics up until the 2010s. Season 2 is already moving through the 2000s and is headed for storylines that define 2010s X-Men comics (like Gambit as a Horseman), and by Season 3 we could be well past much of the 2010s material and starting in on the 2020s X-Men story arcs, like Krakoa.
After that point, it feels like it may get tough to keep X-Men ’97 going at the same pace and quality we’ve enjoyed; rarely do series manage it well when source material runs dry. There’s also the massive hurdle looming over the show, which no one is seemingly addressing: X-Men ’97 Seasons 1 and 2 are the brainchildren of original showrunner Beau DeMayo; starting with Season 3, a whole new creative team will be responsible for what this show looks like, what stories get told, and at what pace they are told. Fans could be in for a very different kind of show come Season 3; then we’ll really see how long they want this series to last (or not).
X-Men ’97 is now streaming on Disney+. Discuss Marvel with us on the Forum!
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