The X-Men movie universe has officially expired. Cause of death: corporate merger. Fans have probably pre-mourned the first superhero franchise of the modern era, which has been on life support for years, as Disney cleared its slate of leftovers — like Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants — in preparation for an inevitable Marvel Cinematic Universe reboot.
But anyone who’s been waiting on a more ceremonious farewell to the Fox years can find it in the closing credits of Deadpool & Wolverine, when this gleefully irreverent movie suddenly gets all mushy about the films it’s been mocking. The only thing ironic about the closing montage of valedictory behind-the-scenes footage is the use of Green Day’s eternally misunderstood Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) to set the sentimental tone.
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But don’t cry for the X-Men. As one era for the Marvel mutants ends, another is just getting started. Make that restarted. Months before Deadpool desecrated the corpse of an X-Man, Disney reanimated a whole team of them — the superheroes who raced into battle to a war cry of synth in the hit cartoon that aired on Fox in the 1990s. As far as doing right by these characters, Deadpool & Wolverine has nothing on the year’s other X-Men-related smash, the Disney+ throwback X-Men ’97.
Make no mistake, fan service is the goal of this small-screen sequel, just as it drives the new big-screen sequel for the Merc with the Mouth. Picking up right where the original animated series left off — as if no time had passed since its series finale back in, yes, 1997 — X-Men ’97 is deeply faithful to the spirit of its basic-cable predecessor. Though a little slicker and more polished, the animation evokes the bright, splashy colors of the earlier show. The voice cast has been almost completely reassembled for the full aural flashback effect. And if you don’t get goosebumps from the way that same old score ramps up on the soundtrack at the start of the opening titles, chances are you didn’t spend your Saturday mornings enthralled by the globe- and time-jumping adventures of Xavier’s gifted youngsters.
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X-Men ’97, in other words, blatantly bids for the eyeballs of not just young viewers, but also their millennial and Gen X parents. But the show is more than nostalgia bait. Watching it churn through a frankly absurd amount of plot over 10 episodes, you start to wonder if any adaptation has better approximated the full appeal of X-Men — the way the comics, at their best, fold an allegory of prejudice and alienation into a sprawling melodrama with a Tolstoy-sized cast of characters and a rather bottomless reservoir of thrilling science-fiction developments.
Not that the show is aiming for the exact experience of reading the comics. Perhaps even more so than the ’90s cartoon, this relaunch blows through story at a pace that would leave Quicksilver winded. Giant crossovers that spanned months — like Inferno, the kooky, convoluted, yearlong X-Men-versus-Hell Spawn event that launched in 1988 — are knocked out in a half hour flat. Other episodes mash together multiple plotlines, combining, say, the trial of Magneto with an attack by the enhanced-human terrorists of the Friends for Humanity. A more conservative show could get an entire season out of the story arcs X-Men ’97 covers in miniature. It’s like speed reading a stack of back issues.
You could call the storytelling rushed, but there’s a lot of fun in how much this show tries to pack into one TV season. X-Men ’97 plays like an enthusiastic remix of X-Men lore, mixing and matching elements from different arcs of the comic. The show splits quintessential Storm story Lifedeath in two, eccentrically pairing its first half with a Jubilee one-off that evokes both Scott Pilgrim and the old X-Men arcade beat ’em up. Meanwhile, no fewer than three major crossover events are blended together for the three-part season finale. It’s as if the creative team, led by Beau DeMayo, were operating under the assumption that they’d never get another shot at the X-Men, so they might as well throw in everything and the kitchen sink. It’s the polar, refreshing opposite of a Netflix show where nothing happens for eight episodes. You better believe Surf Dracula surfs, early and often.
Clones, demons, intergalactic empires, time-traveling robots, spirit animals, a parallel dimension ruled by a rather Trumpian reality-TV executive — you get all of that in X-Men ’97. Watching the show underscores what a narrow conception of this world and these characters the X-Men film franchise provided. Despite lasting for a quarter century — and setting aside the odd outlier like Logan or Deadpool — the series kept repeating itself. The fights looked the same: The good mutants trade blasts with the bad mutants in the woods or a quiet suburban backdrop. Sometimes the plot recycling was literal. Did we really need two adaptations of The Dark Phoenix Saga from the same damn screenwriter? And over and over again, we got some variation on the same conflict between Xavier and Magneto, as if that was the only kind of X-Men story worth telling.
Magneto and Xavier both appear in X-Men ’97, of course. But their relationship frames the season without defining it. Nor does the show play like Wolverine & Friends — that is, like a starring vehicle for the most famous mutant that happens to toss the other X-Men a few lines. This is a true ensemble series, carving out narrative space for many of the characters. Storm gets a sensitive, smoldering romance. Cyclops ends up tangled in a love triangle with … two versions of Jean Grey. The two later have a conversation with their adult son, Cable, that genuinely (if by obvious accident) recalls All of Us Strangers. Rogue grapples with grief. Beast struggles with guilt over providing cover for unscrupulous journalists. At heart, X-Men has always been a soap opera. X-Men ’97 unabashedly embraces that, finding room for interpersonal drama even as the larger plot races forward.
It also boasts some of the best action scenes of its genre — further evidence, after the Spider-Verse movies, that animation might be the ideal medium for comic-book adaptations. The new series peaks, dramatically and in the set-piece department, with Remember It, which shifts from aristocratic mutant politics to a lengthy battle against the giant, robotic sentinels that’s at once thrillingly kinetic and a bleak realization of the genocidal impulses the X-Men — as characters and symbols — have always opposed. We also get some of the coolest Gambit action ever thrown up on screen; with apologies to Channing Tatum, this is the year’s mic-drop moment for the Ragin’ Cajun. You could call Remember It the event of the series, but the truth is that just about every episode of X-Men ’97 is an event. There’s no filler.
X-Men 97 – Death of Gambit
The thing about the X-Men comic is that it was never just one thing. Yes, there were issues where mutants fought other mutants, and other issues where they fought hateful humans. That’s the bedrock stuff of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s seminal team book. But the premise was malleable; it could accommodate all manner of sci-fi weirdness. X-Men ’97 is deeply keyed into that aspect of its source material. It gives you the full scope of what X-Men can be — the whole universe of comic-book lunacy it can traverse — without losing its utility as a moving civil-rights metaphor. The movies never made room for any of that. Good riddance indeed.
X-Men ’97 is now streaming on Disney+. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
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A.A. Dowd, or Alex to his friends, is a writer and editor based in Chicago. He has held staff positions at The A.V. Club and…
Has Deadpool & Wolverine put the MCU back on the right track?
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).
In case you haven’t already heard: The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been on a bit of a decline these past few years. At this point, the once-dominant franchise’s current state isn’t just an open secret — it’s a well-known fact worthy of being referenced multiple times in Deadpool & Wolverine by the film’s eponymous Merc with a Mouth. In its third act, Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson even openly pleads for Marvel to abandon multiversal storytelling altogether. He does that, of course, in a film that ends with his universe being saved from extinction and allowed to exist safely again in Marvel’s multiverse. There’s no point critiquing that contradiction. Making fun of things without fixing them has always been Deadpool’s thing, after all.
Is X-Men Origins: Wolverine really that bad?
In 2009, 20th Century Fox attempted to expand the X-Men movies with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first film in a trilogy to feature Hugh Jackman as the title character. While the film eventually got its sequels, it’s also regarded as one of the worst X-Men movies. This one may have been snake-bitten from the start. Shortly before it was released, the movie was leaked online. While X-Men Origins: Wolverine opened to $85 million domestically, its repeat business was strained at best and it limped to a $373.1 million worldwide total.
Since the origins of Deadpool & Wolverine are closely linked to this film, it’s time to ask if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is really as bad as it appeared to be? There have certainly been worse superhero movies than this one — The Flash, Morbius, and Madame Web all come to mind — but is that enough to redeem X-Men Origins: Wolverine and salvage its reputation? First, let’s look at the things that work in this movie.
Hugh Jackman brings his A-game as Wolverine
Deadpool & Wolverine: Here’s how the X-Men can be introduced into the MCU
When the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched in 2008, the fledgling Marvel Studios was forced to get by without some of their own most ubiquitous characters. Marvel had escaped bankruptcy in the 1990s by selling off the movie rights to their hottest comics libraries, such as Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. Against all odds, this didn’t stop Marvel Studios into becoming a box office juggernaut that turned B- and C-list superheroes like Iron Man and Rocket Raccoon into cultural phenomena. However, with the Marvel empire now in decline, the MCU desperately needs an injection of new characters to recapture audience attention. And as fate (by which we mean, the iron hand and bottomless pockets of Disney) would have it, nearly all of the characters that Marvel auctioned off decades ago are now back in play — namely, the X-Men.
The addition of familiar favorites like Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, and Deadpool into the MCU has been inevitable ever since Disney purchased X-Men rights holders 20th Century Fox in 2019, but Marvel has taken its time in reintroducing these absent characters into the sprawling franchise. There have been some teases throughout the ongoing Multiverse Saga, but so far, no notable X-Men characters have debuted in the core continuity of the MCU (referred to as Earth-616 in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but as Earth-199999 in most other places).
That may all change after Deadpool & Wolverine, a film that serves as a bridge between the now-defunct 20th Century Fox X-Men film franchise and Disney/Marvel’s MCU. Here, Ryan Reynolds reprises his role as the wisecracking, fourth-wall-smashing Deadpool, whose films take place in a continuity adjacent to the mainline Fox X-Men series, while Hugh Jackman returns to portray a version of Wolverine from a timeline we’ve never seen before. It’s a multiverse-hopping adventure involving the Time Variance Authority from the MCU series Loki, and will certainly have implications on how and in what form the X-Men will arrive in Marvel’s main movie timeline.
We’ve got a few ideas regarding how the X-Men’s MCU debut might play out, based on hints from Deadpool & Wolverine’s trailers, existing films, and context from the comic book source material.
Multiversal mashup
A key difficulty with adding the X-Men to the existing MCU is explaining their absence from the story so far. It’s one thing to hand-wave the Eternals skipping the final battle against Thanos, but it would be a much harder sell if a future MCU installment were to reveal that Charles Xavier’s benevolent Mutant superheroes and/or Magneto’s more radical Brotherhood have been operating in secret all along but somehow never crossed paths with the Avengers. Further, the idea that Mutants have been around for generations is central to a lot of X-Men mythology, and certain characters (namely, Magneto) have firm ties to specific historical events and can’t easily be transplanted into the present day without accounting for their whereabouts in the meantime.
However, throughout the Multiverse Saga — which began production after Disney bought out Fox — characters from the core Marvel Cinematic Universe have found themselves in alternate realities that resemble their own but also include X-Men characters. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the MCU’s Strange visits an Earth that is watched over by the Illuminati, a council that includes familiar faces such as Peggy Carter, Professor X, portrayed by a returning Sir Patrick Stewart, and “Mr. Fantastic” Reed Richards, a character who was also reacquired by Disney during the Fox deal.
The Marvels (2023) | Post Credits Scene
In the post-credits scene to The Marvels, Monica Rambeau crosses over into a universe that is home to a superpowered version of her mother, but also Dr. Hank “Beast” McCoy. The setting of Deadpool & Wolverine, which is presumably the home universe of the latter character, features several returning Fox X-Men cast members reprising their roles as well as alternate versions of MCU characters like Ant-Man, and possibly Doctor Strange (or some other sling-ring user).
The implication here seems to be that the multiverse is full of Earths on which the Avengers, the X-Men, and other characters to which Marvel Studios previously couldn’t use have all co-existed from the beginning, more or less the way they have in the comics. This would make the core MCU — as well as the Avengers-less Fox X-Men universes — something of an aberration.
Presently, the Multiverse Saga is slated to conclude in 2027 with Avengers: Secret Wars, a film that shares the name of a 2015 comics event in which the Marvel Comics multiverse was collapsed and reformed. If the film centers around a similar disaster, this could be an ideal opportunity to mash the MCU’s Earth with another in which the X-Men have always been around — not the X-Men from Deadpool or the X-Men movie continuity, but different versions of the characters who could be as similar or different from the ones fans already know and love. Future MCU installments would be free to revisit or reimagine popular storylines in this new context, or to accept the broad strokes of the films that already exist and then move forward.
