Despite the drama, Disney+ renews X-Men '97 for a third season

After parting ways in loud and dramatic fashion with series creator Beau DeMayo, Marvel is still pushing forward with the animated revival project.

By William Hughes | October 11, 2025 | 7:14pm

Image: Disney+

TV News X-Men '97

Despite the drama, Disney+ renews X-Men '97 for a third season

Things have not been entirely smooth for Disney+’s animated revival project X-Men ’97 over the last few years. Sure, the reviews of the show’s first season were great, praising how the series managed to revive the tone and feel of the original Fox Saturday morning X-Men cartoon with updated sensibilities (and a mean streak for actual drama). But the behind-the-scenes story has been a huge mess, after Disney parted ways with creator Beau DeMayo right before the show began airing, beginning a Cold War that eventual broke into actual fighting as DeMayo accused Disney of targeting and gaslighting him for being gay, and Disney accused him of being the subject of complaints of “egregious” workplace behavior.

None of which has stopped the streamer from renewing the series for a second season—or, indeed, a third, which was announced at New York Comic-Con on Saturday. Accompanied by footage of season 2 (at least partially written by DeMayo, according to reports) the renewal announcement solidified earlier indications that a third season was in development, now in the hands of Matthew Chauncey, a writer on Marvel’s What If…? There’s a pretty big question of what this show even looks like without DeMayo, who’s credited as a writer on each of the first season’s episodes, and who frequently spoke online about how his personal experiences informed its depiction of mutant life—but Disney seems bound and determined to find out.

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Per Variety, fans at the show’s New York Comic-Con panel also got to see footage of the series in action in its second season; as hinted at with the end of the first, it’ll apparently see the X-Men facing off against their old foe, the aggressively Darwinian Apocalypse. (That’s in the “survival-of-the-fittest” sense, not just riding around on Beagles and looking at turtles.) They’ll also struggle to get back to the present (which is to say, the late ’90s), after getting tossed all over the place in time. X-Men ’97‘s second season is expected to debut some time in the summer of 2026.