X-Men '97 Season 2 Review — Four Episodes In, Marvel's Best Show Is Getting Better

X-Men '97 sits at 99% on the aggregate, which makes it the highest-rated property Marvel has ever produced in any medium. Season two premiered on 1 July 2026 and is airing weekly as we write this, four episodes deep, with a third season already confirmed. That is an unusual position to review from, so let us be honest about it: this is a mid-season verdict on an unfinished story, and the score below is provisional. On the evidence so far, it is also the only Marvel property currently operating at the top of its form.

The Verdict So Far

Why This Show Works When The Films Do Not

The central insight of X-Men '97 is that it treats the 1992 animated series not as nostalgia but as a promise. It picks up directly from the 1997 finale, keeps the melodrama, keeps the voice cast where possible, keeps the theme tune, and then plays every one of those elements completely straight. There is no winking. Nobody undercuts an emotional moment with a joke. In an era where the MCU's default register is self-deprecation, sincerity turns out to be a competitive advantage.

Season one built to Genosha — a mutant nation recognised by the United Nations and annihilated by a Sentinel in a single afternoon — and the episode remains the most devastating hour Marvel has put on any screen. It works because the show earned it: characters we had spent seven episodes with, a victory we had watched them win, and a cost the series refused to soften afterwards.

The show's real trick is that it believes in its own melodrama. Once you stop apologising for the format, the format becomes a weapon.

What Season Two Is Doing

The escalation is substantial. Bastion arrives as the season's organising threat, Mister Sinister moves from background manipulator to active player, and the series adopts a timeline-hopping structure that scatters the team across periods rather than locations. It is the most ambitious thing the show has attempted and it is also, structurally, the most dangerous.

1. Episode one picks up the season one cliffhanger without a recap crutch and trusts the audience to keep up. Confident, and slightly ruthless.
2. The second episode is the strongest of the run so far — a nearly self-contained hour that does for one character what Genosha did for the team.
3. Episode three widens the scope and is the weakest, spending too long establishing geography that the following episode compresses anyway.
4. Episode four recovers, and includes a sequence involving Magneto that reframes his entire season one arc. If the show sustains this, it will beat season one.

The Cast, And Who Is Being Served

The One Real Risk

Timeline-hopping is the hardest structure in serialised storytelling, and it has broken better-resourced shows than this. The danger is not confusion — this series has always been clear — but dilution. Season one worked because the team was together, arguing, in one building. Scattering them across periods buys scale at the cost of the friction that generated the show's best scenes.

• Four episodes in, the scattering has produced two outstanding character hours and one flat one.
• The Bastion material is being drip-fed effectively, but the season will need to pay it off at Genosha's scale to justify the setup.
• Two team members have had almost nothing to do, which is survivable at four episodes and would not be at eight.
• The animation remains superb, with a fluidity in the action sequences that the 1992 series could only dream of.

Where It Sits In Marvel's Slate

This is comfortably the strongest thing bearing the Marvel name right now, and the gap is not small. Daredevil: Born Again season two is excellent and we said so in our review; Wonder Man is a delightful surprise. Neither is operating at this level of ambition. On the film side, the studio's next release is Spider-Man: Brand New Day on 31 July 2026, followed by Avengers: Doomsday in December.

It also does something the live-action slate has failed at for years: it makes newcomers care about mutants without requiring a decade of viewing. If season two is your entry point, our X-Men newcomer's guide covers the vocabulary, and the show fills in the rest faster than you would expect. Marvel's live-action The X-Men is not due until 15 December 2028 with no casting announced, which makes this the definitive screen version of these characters for at least another two years.

The Bottom Line

Watch it weekly. On four episodes, season two is matching season one and threatening to exceed it, with a structural gamble that could go either way in the back half. We will revisit with a final score when the season concludes. Season three is confirmed, and on current evidence it will deserve the renewal.