MCU X-Men reboot confirmed! Meet the new writers, a fresh approach to the story, and the way mutants will be introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Marvel fans have been clamoring for one thing for a long time: the inclusion of the X-Men in the MCU. Rumors have been swirling on the web since Disney took over 20th Century Fox and rights to Marvel’s much loved mutants were reverted. We got a few teasers for the blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. In a raft of interviews, director Jake Schreier, currently directing Marvel’s Thunderbolts team movie revealed some big, long-awaited news about the X-Men Reboot.
This is the news you’ve been waiting for if you love Marvel’s mutants. Here’s what Schreier actually said about the film director/writer and why the MCU could benefit from this “new start.”
One of the largest questions around the new X-Men film was who Marvel President Kevin Feige would deem worthy to pen it. The X-Men aren’t just another superhero team, they have decades of intricate comic history, social commentary, and fan expectations.
Jake Schreier has also officially confirmed that the script is now with an amazing, Emmy-winning duo – Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo.
If these names seem familiar, that’s because they are the masterminds behind a few of the best TVs you’ve watched these past couple years. For The Beefdown, it is original showrunner Lee Sung Jin, an award-winning maker recognized for his dark comedy and seismic character dynamics. Bear co-showrunner and writer Joanna Calo is a critically lauded FX series that artfully captures tension, collaboration and fraught emotional trauma.
You might be wondering: Why bring on the writers of character-rich emotional TV dramedies True Blood and Six Feet Under to pen the screenplay for a sprawling superhero movie?
The explanation is simple: the MCU X-Men are basically a superpowered soap opera.
At their heart, the X-Men aren’t really about fighting giant robots or alien inva sions to save the world. They’re found family, They’re discrimination and personal trauma and they’re different kinds of people learning to accept who they are. The great X-Men comics (and there are very many, this list is by no means exhaustive) mine the relationships, rivalries and romances among the characters in the X-Mansion.
Marvel is showing its intentions with the teaming up of the minds behind Beef and The Bear. Rather than just having a bunch of big-scale computer generated images, they want the next X-Men to be more about character growth and emotional subtlety.
Maybe the most exciting thing Jake Schreier gave away was the direction the team is heading creatively. He said that they’re deliberately trying to take a “less-trodden path.”
What does that mean? So what that means is, they just don’t want to do what the 20th Century Fox movies have already done.
The X-Men line of films from Fox, which began in 2000 and ended its run with Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants, really treated us with some wild goodness. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Patrick Stewart’s Professor X are iconic. Yet, for twenty years, the series was defined by the very same characters and themes. Magneto vs. Professor X, we’ve seen that debate play out several times. We even got to see the Dark Phoenix saga twice. We saw Wolverine take centre stage in just about every film.
The MCU reset will be a clean slate, Schreier says. They’re delving into X-Men lore in a way that’s never before been seen on the big screen.
If Marvel is steering clear of the “beaten path,” we could see some big differences from the previous films. Here are just a few ways they could make this reboot feel completely new:
A Different Villain: Instead of positioning Magneto as the chief antagonist right off the bat, the MCU might introduce classic villains that we’ve never really seen done justice. Mister Sinister, the Hellfire Club, or even the Purifiers would be fantastic, terrifying adversaries for the latest generation of mutants.
A Completely New Team: Rather than starting with the same team from the 2000 film, Marvel could bring on fan-favorite mutants who never really got their moment in the sun, such as Jubilee, Gambit, Emma Frost, or a version of Cyclops that’s properly comic-accurate and actually gets to lead the team.
The School Dynamic: The Fox movies regularly used the Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters as a backdrop. The MCU could play it like a real school and tell stories about the day-to-day lives, drama & struggles of young mutants trying to control their powers.
Jake Schreier’s inclusion here is no accident. He is helming Thunderbolts, a further film dealing with a scrappy, problematic team of super-powered people.
Schreier stressed this balance in these group films in his latest drafts. Marvel fans are familiar with big, exhilarating set piece scenes, but you also need those quiet, emotional moments where the characters interact.
Balancing an ensemble cast (a film with multiple leads) is notoriously hard. You need to give every character a full story arc, and they don’t all do that then just kind of fade away into the background. Schreier’s previous direction of the Thunderbolts lineup including Yelena Belova, Bucky Barnes, and Red Guardian will definitely offer a great take on how the X-Men should be treated.
If the writing team nailing the emotional heft of a show like The Bear is able to combine that with the superhero spectacle the MCU is known for, fans are in for a masterpiece.
Although we now know who the writing team is and how they plan to generally tackle it, one gigantic question mark remains: how and when will mutants be brought into the MCU?We are currently now at the tailend of the “Multiverse Saga” in the MCU, which will end with Avengers: Secret Wars.There are two main theories about how the X-Men will be introduced:
Deadpool & Wolverine dealt extensively in the multiverse, leading some fans to speculate that the MCU X-Men will come from an alternate timeline. In the course of Secret Wars, their universe could potentially be brought into contact with the primary MCU timeline (known as Earth-616), potentially leading to the surviving mutants making the world of the Avengers their home.
There are also some fans who want to see things that are a bit more grounded. Due to this line of reasoning mutants have always existed in the MCU but either they were extremely rare or Professor X wiped their memories so they wouldn’t be able to remember being mutants in a society that would hate and fear them. For better or worse, a global incident activates the “X-Gene” in thousands of adolescents around the world, bringing mutants out of hiding and into the light of day.
Either way, it sounds like whatever path Marvel goes down, they are setting themselves up for a “fresh start”, giving them the ability to shape the mutant corner of the universe exactly how they want to, unencumbered by the past movie continuity.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the butt of jokes for a few years now after waiting for the fall of Avengers: Endgame. Sure there have been huge hits like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 but there have also been some financial flops and fan grumbles. The X-Men are the golden ticket for Marvel Studios.
The mutant heroes are perhaps the most popular and relatable heroes in all of Marvel’s catalog. The Marvel slate is only getting better by accepting the realities of modern storytelling and the best ones to take advantage of that are shows like Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo’s strain on familiar characters that is a whole new, character-focused vision – Marvel is clearly indicating they are taking this reboot seriously.
Maybe Phase 6 of the MCU, and after, will just be the MCU X-Men. If successful, it will mean that audiences will come back to theaters for another ten years of crazy, wonderful storytelling.
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The news coming out of Jake Schreier’s mouth is exactly what the fans really needed to know ahead of time. The MCU X-Men reboot isn’t just a rumor anymore, it’s actually being drafted by some of the most talented creators in Hollywood today.
By focusing on a “clean slate” and getting to the deep, emotional core of what makes the mutants so special, Marvel is clearing the decks for something really incredible. The path to the new MCU X-Men film may still be a few years off, but knowing it lies in the hands of writers that really get character drama makes the wait more than worthwhile.
Get ready for XMen 97 Season 2 with the official Marvel comics guide. Discover the essential prelude series and key storylines to read before watching.
A few classic XMen comics that are worth diving into first before watching XMen 97 Season 2. Not because the series demands it, but to understand the depth of these stories that make the new season even more rewarding. When you are going to watch the new season knowing why Rama-Tut is terrifying, the complicated origins of Cable, Cyclops and Jean’s heartwrenching journey of raising a kid is going to wreck you emotionally before the season even hits its stride.
Marvel designed a guide around this season along with the nine new episodes. This makes you understand as Season 2 doesn’t play it safe with a single timeline. Characters are scattered in three different eras — past, present, and future. Ancient Egypt era where everything is started, future nightmare that is almost finished off the world, and present day that’s trying to hold itself together without its most powerful heroes.
Each of those threads is rooted in a specific chunk of 1990s and early 2000s comic lore, and if you go in blind, you’re going to miss half the emotional weight the writers spent years building. So let’s dive into the depth of the comic guide before watching XMen 97 Season 2.
Before getting into the comics, it helps to remember where Season 1 left off. The finale, now referred to in the show’s canon as Extinction Day or E-Day, ended with Magneto’s orbital sanctuary, Asteroid M, getting caught in a nuclear strike after Bastion weaponized it using Cable’s stolen time-travel technology. The explosion didn’t just destroy the asteroid — it tore open a temporal singularity that swallowed the surviving XMen whole.
To the world of 1997, the team is dead. Martyrs who sacrificed themselves to save a species that spent years hunting them. In reality, they’re scattered across time, and that scattering is the entire engine of XMen 97 Season 2. Rogue, Nightcrawler, Beast, Magneto, and Xavier land in 3000 B.C. Cyclops and Jean Grey get thrown nearly two millennia into the future. And back in the present, Forge, Jubilee, Sunspot, Bishop, and an adult Cable are left to figure out how to defend a world that no longer has its XMen.
You just have to understand the structure that isn’t random. And you know it after looking at it like a blueprint.
If there’s one book you actually shouldn’t skip, it’s this one. The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, a four-issue miniseries from 1994 written by Scott Lobdell with art by Gene Ha, is the emotional backbone of the entire future timeline in Season 2.
If we look at its Season 1, Cyclops and Jean have to send their little son Nathan forcibly into the future while trying to save him from a techno-organic virus. That infection is injected into the Mister Sinister before he could realise it. That separation broke something between them. Now, in Season 2, they land in that same future — a wasteland ruled by Apocalypse — and they’re reunited with Nathan, who’s being sheltered by a resistance movement called Clan Askani.
This is where the comic becomes essential reading. It’s not just about Cyclops and Jean surviving a hostile future. It’s about them getting an almost unbearable second chance: raising the son they thought they’d lost, knowing the whole time that his destiny is to become Cable and eventually travel back to fight a war against Apocalypse that never really ends. There’s also a deeper layer here if you dig into the lore — Mother Askani, the leader sheltering them, is in the comics an aged version of Rachel Summers, an alternate-reality daughter of Cyclops and Jean. That’s the kind of detail that turns a “oh that’s a nice reunion” scene into something that quietly gutting once you know what’s underneath it.
Read this one before Episode 1. It’ll change how you watch every scene between Scott, Jean, and young Nathan.
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The second must-read is Rise of Apocalypse, a 1996 series that traces En Sabah Nur’s origins as an orphaned rebel rescued by the nomadic Sandstormers tribe and raised under the oppressive rule of Rama-Tut, a time-displaced version of Kang the Conqueror.
Season 2 leans hard into this. When Magneto, Xavier, Rogue, Beast, and Nightcrawler land in 3000 B.C., they don’t stumble into a fully formed tyrant. They meet a young, marginalized warrior fighting for survival against Rama-Tut’s forces — someone they instinctively want to protect. The series is clearly building one of the most thought-provoking ideas: what if X-Men act of goodness is actually the reason that pushes En Sabah Nur on the path to becoming Apocalypse?
That question is much more impactful if you have read the source material, as “Rise of Apocalypse” dedicates actual time — and page count, really — to making him more human before his Darwinian “survival of the’’fittest” ethos hardens into something monstrous. Watching Magneto, of all people, end up in a position to mentor him adds a whole other layer, given Magneto’s own history as a genocide survivor turned militant. This isn’t a book you need to memorize, but understanding the broad strokes will make the ancient Egypt storyline land as more than just “cool desert battles with a future villain.”
As Xavier is not present in the timeline so the burden of protecting mutantkind shifts to Cable. XMen 97 Season 2 has him forming the X-Force group that favors decisive, lethal defense over diplomacy and approaches hook that traditionally defined XMen.
If you read Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza’s original X-Force run from 1991 then you could understand the tonal shift of this series. The nature of the story is heavily leaned towards aggressive and cold action, suggesting that peaceful coexistence isn’t always realistic when the world keeps trying to kill you. You don’t need to read the whole run cover to cover — even flipping through the first handful of issues will give you a feel for why Cable operates the way he does, and why characters like Archangel and Psylocke fit so naturally into this rougher, more combat-focused unit.
It also helps explain the tension the show is clearly building between Cable and Jubilee, who’s trying to hold onto Xavier’s original dream in a present day that increasingly doesn’t have room for it.
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The series is more focused on visual directions rather than the specific plot. Grand Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men crafting its heroes in a new look from bright colorful costumes of the 90’s. The expectation of updated designs in X Men 97 Season 2 could be more practical and understated than before that matches the tone of the series.
If you have seen any XMen 97 Season 2 promotional images, you would have noticed that they’re drawing clear inspiration from this influential era of the comics. A less primary-color superhero is a direct visual nod to this run.
You don’t have to read all of it, but even just scrolling through the art will give you a sense of the aesthetic direction the show is heading. Thematically, it seems to be turning into a rougher, more realistic time period for mutants which goes hand in hand with everything else we’re seeing this season.
Marvel released a five-issue prelude comic, written by Steve Foxe with art by Salva Espin, that was developed in direct coordination with Marvel Studios Animation. This isn’t a loosely connected tie-in. It’s built to fill in the gaps between the two seasons, focusing on Forge, Jubilee, Bishop, and Sunspot as they deal with a terrified public in the immediate aftermath of E-Day.
Because animated episodes only have so much runtime, a lot of connective tissue simply couldn’t fit on screen. This comic is where that missing context lives. It covers how the mutant population processes losing its most visible protectors, and it sets the emotional and political temperature for the present-day storyline you’ll see play out with X-Force and X-Factor. If you only have time for one book on this list, honestly, this is the one that most directly sets up what you’re about to watch.
Some shows throw comic references in as easter eggs for longtime readers. X Men 97 Season 2 is doing something more deliberate. The show went through a genuinely turbulent production period — original showrunner Beau DeMayo was removed before Season 1 even premiered, and Matthew Chauncey stepped in to lead a significant restructuring of scripts that had already been written. Despite that shake-up, the creative team clearly leaned even harder into comic accuracy rather than pulling away from it, likely to keep the storytelling grounded while so much else behind the scenes was in flux.
That’s part of why this reading list isn’t just marketing fluff. The show is adapting real, specific arcs, not just borrowing character names. Knowing where Cable actually comes from, why Apocalypse isn’t just a generic big bad, and what X-Force represents philosophically will genuinely change how you experience these nine episodes.
If a full reading list feels like a lot before July 1, prioritize in this order:
The XMen 97 Season 2 prelude comic first, since it’s the most directly connected to what you’re watching. Then The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, because the future timeline hits differently once you know Mother Askani’s identity and the weight of what Cyclops and Jean are being given a second chance at. After that, a quick skim of Rise of Apocalypse will do more for your understanding of the 3000 B.C. storyline than any recap video could.
XForce and New XMen are the optional extras — great for context, not essential for following the plot.
Whatever you manage to get through, one thing’s clear: this isn’t a season built for casual viewing. It’s built for people who want to sit with these characters across five thousand years of history and come out the other side understanding exactly why the X-Men’s story never really lets them rest.
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XMen 97 Season 2 isn’t just continuing the animated series, it’s expanding the timeline of Marvel storytelling. From character arcs to costume choices, everything is rooted in comic history. That’s why you should read a few comics before starting watching this series.
You will understand the dangerous villain Apocalypse’s tragic beginnings and Cyclops and Jean’s emotional reunion with Nathan that adds depth to the show when you watch it only by reading a handful of key stories. You don’t need to read every comic. And that’s exactly what makes XMen 97 Season 2 feel like more than a nostalgic revival.
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Spider Man Brand New Day settles a long-running Marvel debate, showing why Peter Parker possesses a key strength that Jean Grey never truly had.
Jean Grey almost seems to have powers, a woman who has hosted the Phoenix Force itself which has given her access to cosmic-level abilities capable of destroying entire star systems, the most powerful telepaths and telekinetics in Marvel history. Spider Man, by contrast, has proportional strength, sticky hands, and a knack for one-liners. Comparing them is impossible but Spider Man Brand New Day has quietly made the case that Peter Parker has something Jean Grey has never fully had, and probably never will.
Spider-Man’s greatest strength is not his powers, but his ability to stay in control. And in a shared universe where power without control has repeatedly ended in catastrophe, that single trait might be the most underrated superpower in the entire Marvel roster.
Jean Grey’s entire publishing history is, in some sense, a story about a woman who keeps losing herself. The Dark Phoenix Saga did not happen once. It has echoed across decades of X-Men storytelling because the underlying problem was never solved, only postponed. Jean’s power is cosmic in scale, but her ability to regulate that power has always been fragile, dependent on external safeguards: Professor X’s psychic shielding, the M’Kraan Crystal, death and resurrection cycles that reset the clock without actually fixing the wiring.
This is not a criticism of Jean as a character. It is the entire point of her tragedy. Her strength is inseparable from her vulnerability. Her challenge of controlling grows as her power grows. This tension has defined many of her most important storylines since Chris Claremont has had to grapple with the same unresolved question: what if Jean Grey won’t be able to handle the Phoenix force under control?
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Unlike Jean Grey, Spider Man’s powers are always in control by the man behind the mask. Peter Parker has fought with powerful symbiotes and villains but his core abilities of strength, agility, spider-sense, never put his senses at risk. Spider-Man’s powers have never threatened to take control of who he is.
This matters more than it sounds like it should. A huge amount of Spider Man’s appeal, and a huge amount of his narrative stability, comes from the fact that his power has a ceiling Peter himself can actually manage. He gets stronger gear, smarter tactics, better web fluid formulas, but he is never one bad day away from accidentally incinerating a solar system. His mistakes are human-scale. They cost lives sometimes, devastatingly so, but they don’t threaten cosmic annihilation.
Brand New Day leans directly into this. The new arc strips Peter back down to fundamentals: a guy with a job, a strained personal life, and a set of powers he understands inside and out after two decades of trial and error. There’s no cosmic entity riding shotgun in his nervous system. There’s no countdown clock to a forced transformation into something unrecognizable. Whatever goes wrong in his life goes wrong because of choices, not because his own biology turned against him.
Jean Grey raw power is not actually the most valuable trait in a long-running superhero but a Control over itself. A superhuman who can bend their abilities according to their morale rather than being consumed by it is structurally more stable and more heroic and easier to write more consistently for that character.
Spider Man’s advantage isn’t that he could beat Jean Grey in a fight. He almost certainly couldn’t, and no serious reading of either character pretends otherwise. The advantage is narrative and psychological. Peter Parker has never needed an entire team of telepaths standing by in case his own power turns on him. He has never needed to die and come back just to reset a corrupted internal system. His worst-case scenario has always been “Peter makes a bad call,” not “Peter becomes an extinction-level event.”
That distinction sounds abstract until you actually compare the stakes of their respective failure states. When Spider Man fails, a building falls, someone gets hurt, a relationship breaks. When Jean Grey fails at containing the Phoenix, planets have died. Those are not the same category of risk, and the gap between them is exactly what makes Peter’s failures recoverable in a way Jean’s sometimes aren’t.
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The current Brand New Day run doesn’t make this argument through a crossover fight or a direct confrontation between Peter and Jean. It makes the argument through restraint. The storyline deliberately resets Peter to a stripped-down status quo, no recent cosmic baggage, no Venom symbiote drama bleeding into every page, no marriage retcon hanging over his head. Just Peter, his powers, and his choices.
And the story works specifically because Peter’s powers don’t need a leash. There’s no subplot about him losing control of his own abilities. There’s no ticking clock toward Peter “going dark.” Every conflict in the arc comes from his decisions, his relationships, his double life catching up with him, not from some internal force threatening to hijack his body.
Compare that to how X-Men stories involving Jean almost always need a containment plan built into the premise. Cerebro shielding. Phoenix suppression tech. A team on standby specifically because Jean’s own power is treated as an ongoing risk factor, not just a tool she uses. Brand New Day never needs any equivalent safety net for Peter, because his powers were never written as a threat to himself in the first place.
It’s quite a premise that Marvel can build an entire arc around Spider-Man’s powers without once treating those powers as the danger. Try writing a major Jean Grey arc with the same constraint, and you will find it almost impossible to avoid touching the Phoenix question at all.
It’s easy to chalk this up to “Spider Man is more relatable because he’s just a regular guy.” That’s true, but it understates the point. Reliability is an advantage here rather than Relatability.
Spider Man can show up in street-level crime stories without a containment problem, that’s the type of self-control hero put into a story. His power scales to the situation because his control over it never wavers. Jean Grey, on the other hand, often has to be deliberately written around her own ceiling. Writers either avoid pushing her power to its limits, or they commit to another Phoenix arc and accept that the story is now, on some level, about her losing herself again.
Peter never forces that choice. That flexibility is the direct result of the advantage Brand New Day highlights: power that stays in proportion to the person holding it.
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A fair counterargument is that Jean Grey struggles to control her power because Phoenix is far beyond anything Spider Man has ever encountered. Spider Man’s control looks easy because he never loses himself, so comparing their situations isn’t entirely equal. That’s made the perspective more interesting as Jean’s constant battle with immense power makes her character remains one of the most compelling tragic figures in the X-Men mythos.
But that argument actually reinforces the original point rather than undercutting it. The advantage isn’t that Peter is stronger or braver. It’s that his power was built at a scale he can actually master. Jean was handed power at a scale no one, arguably not even her, can fully master. One of those setups produces a hero who can be trusted with almost any story. The other produces a recurring tragedy that has to be written carefully every single time. Both can be great storytelling. Only one of them is a genuine advantage in the practical, day-to-day sense of “can this character function without a built-in failure mode.”
Jean Grey will always be the more powerful character on a raw numbers basis, and nothing about Brand New Day changes that math. But power was never the category where Spider Man had a shot at winning this comparison. Control was. And Brand New Day proves, almost by omission, that Peter Parker’s powers have never needed a leash, a containment plan, or a reset button.
Stability is more important than strength. And in a universe built on cosmic stakes and constant escalation, a hero who never has to be the thing his own team worries about might be rarer, and more valuable, than anyone gives him credit for.
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