X-Men ‘97 Is Going To Kill The MCU

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 15 seconds ago

Right now, X-Men ‘97 Season 2 is absolutely killing it, maintaining the almost impossibly high standard created by Season 1. Understandably, fans are wondering exactly how much of this awesome animated revival we are going to get. The exact answer to that question is something of a moving target. Previously, executive producer Larry Houston said that Marvel Animation is currently working on Seasons 3 and 4 and that the goal is to hit at least five seasons, which would match the original X-Men: The Animated Series. While that’s already an ambitious goal, one power player at Marvel is dreaming even bigger.

In a recent interview with POC Culture, Houston confirmed that Brad Winderbaum, the Head of Streaming, Television and Animation at Marvel Studios, would love to do 10 seasons. Unsurprisingly, the writers, producers, and voice actors support this goal, as that means we’d be getting more of this hit series for the better part of a decade. However, there’s one potential downside that none of the movers and shakers at Marvel have considered. If X-Men ‘97 can maintain this same level of quality for 10 seasons, it may effectively kill the MCU by forcing fans to ask the obvious question about live-action Marvel movies: “why can’t they be as good as the cartoon?”

Comparison Is The Thief Of Joy

It’s an open secret that, after Avengers: Endgame, Marvel really fell off, both creatively and commercially. Once, this franchise regularly pumped out billion-dollar movies; however, that became a rarity (last year, neither The Thunderbolts nor The Fantastic Four: First Steps came anywhere close). Major warning bells began to sound when The Marvels, a direct sequel to one of those billion-dollar films, actually lost the studio money. Because of this, MCU guru Kevin Feige created a daring strategy. With Avengers: Doomsday and the return of Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr., he hopes to channel Endgame. And with Avengers: Secret Wars, he’d reboot the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

That reboot will allow for recasting popular characters like Captain America and Iron Man while adding some major players (like the X-Men) to the MCU. Because the mutants are headed to the big screen, you might think that X-Men ‘97 lasting for a decade would be a good thing because it creates synergy across multiple platforms and media. However, this cartoon knocking it out of the park year after year could be a problem because it naturally invites fan comparisons to the MCU. No matter how good the X-Men movie is, its two hours will be compared to entire seasons of X-Men ‘97. If the movie is bad, fans may cry for yet another cinematic reboot. 

It’s Not Just In Our Heads

The decline of the MCU had already happened long before the premiere of X-Men ‘97 Season 1. Media outlets began tossing around the term “superhero fatigue” to pretend this decline was out of Marvel’s control and that millions of people suddenly lost their appetite for tights-and-flights movies overnight. In reality, these movies stopped making as much money because so many of them weren’t as good as earlier films. All it took was a handful of lukewarm Marvel movies to nearly destroy the franchise because all of us remembered how, not that many years ago (there were only four years between Endgame and The Marvels!), the studio knew how to make good films. 

Now, maybe Kevin Feige’s dream comes true and both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars provide Endgame-level quality and revive major public interest in the franchise. But what happens if the subsequent movies suffer a major dip in quality like so many of the post-Endgame movies? We’ll just be in for “superhero fatigue” 2.0, which will be accelerated because X-Men ‘97 will constantly remind us how good these films could be. It was bad enough when we were simply comparing new, mediocre movies to excellent ones from the past. How much worse will future flops be when we know Marvel has killer writers and they are simply working on another project?

When You’re Destined To Die

Obviously, this isn’t to blame X-Men ‘97; the show is perfect, and if we get eight more seasons after this, this ‘80s kid’s heart will fill with joy. But as far back as Season 1, fans were comparing this show to the live-action films and actively questioning why Marvel could create a consistently awesome series but kept dropping the ball with feature films. If the MCU experiences a similar post-Secret Wars decline in film quality while X-Men ‘97 keeps knocking it out of the park, the box office for these movies will shrivel up and die. Why spend a small fortune to see a mediocre movie when better superhero stories are streaming on demand?

In the end, the perfect cartoon might kill the most ambitious cinematic franchise ever created. Should the MCU die, though, they could always take their cue from X-Men ‘97: just wait nearly three decades and pick up right where they left off!