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When it comes to X-Men '97, the answer to any question has to be "more, always more." After waiting longer than two years following the iconic cliffhanger that served as the Season 1 finale, Season 2 not only made its premiere in early July — it blew the proverbial house down and, of course, audiences never want the ride to end.
Great news has arrived in that regard, and it's the type that would make even Cyclops smile (he never really does anymore, does he?). In a recent interview about Disney+'s acclaimed hit series, one of the top minds behind X-Men '97 told everyone what they wanted to hear.
How Many X-Men '97 Seasons Will There Be?
To be fair, it could be argued that the news is bittersweet, mostly because Marvel is promising several more seasons of X-Men '97, but they're also putting a finite number on it.
"I would say, if they can at least match what I did [with the original series], five seasons, it would be great, maybe six," series producer Larry Houston told The Direct. "But everything depends on the audience and how well-received the stories that they're doing are."
He then explained that six seasons isn't some arbitrary number, but rather one rooted in the original X-Men series from the early 1990s, one he directed: "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."
X-Men '97 Eyeing Six Seasons, But There Could Be More ...
Having now committed to a strict release schedule that promises a new season every year and not every 2.5 years, Marvel Studios and Disney+ are both in lockstep for X-Men '97 and what the future holds for the series.
"It's gonna be a year until the next one, and a year until the next one [after that]," Houston said in late May. "They are on schedule now. One of the reasons they're on schedule is we've gone over, given notes on, and responded to not only all the scripts for Season 3, [and] all the animatics for Season 3, [but] we are in Season 4 giving script notes. So that's how deep they are into the development."
With one of the show's lead writers, Eric Lewald, proclaiming "there's a commitment until our grandchildren have grandchildren," it does make it difficult to fathom that Disney+ would walk away from X-Men '97 after only six seasons, given the runaway success and acclaim each new episode is receiving. That does speak to what Houston is saying, though, in that if audiences want more than six seasons, they have to keep this energy and momentum going forward.
"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," he told The Direct. "Because there's been 24, 25 more years of other stories that I never touched, that this current X-Men '97 production is exploring."
Both seasons of X-Men '97 are currently streaming on Disney+.
