X-Men ’97 Season 2 Trailer Breakdown: Apocalypse, New Costumes, and More

This article contains details from X-Men comics that could spoil X-Men ’97 season 2.

It’s here, my X-Men! The first trailer for season 2 of X-Men ’97 has arrived, chock-full of the superhero soap opera goodies that made the first season such a sensation. Season 1 proved that X-Men ’97 wanted to be so much more than a nostalgic continuation of the original series, which ran from 1992 to 1997. More than just picking up storylines and adding elements from comics published in the intervening three decades, X-Men ’97 tackled pressing themes about oppression and genocide, portraying them through some of the most striking animation you’ll see outside of an anime.

X-Men ’97 may be more than a throwback Marvel Comics adaptation, but it’s not less than that either. And the first trailer for season 2 is bursting at the seams with plot hints and lore nods. Let’s channel our inner Caliban and hunt them all down!

Time Travel Means Time for a Costume Change

The original Animated Series kept the team in the Jim Lee-designed costumes of the era. But season 2 of X-Men ’97 finally gives our heroes reason to raid the closet.

Storm has done away with the silver outfit for the one that Lee briefly gave her in 1991, a riff on the standard Xavier Institute training uniform, while Wolverine has reverted to his pre-Lee look, returning to the brown and yellow togs he wore throughout the ’80s. Sunspot wears the costume he made after Cable and Cannonball left X-Force (thankfully skipping over the infamous graduation uniforms the New Mutants had).

The most notable costumes are the grey and yellow clothes worn by Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Rogue. Those outfits come directly from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s run in the early 2000s. Partially to reject the idea that the X-Men were superheroes, and partly to bring the comics in line with the leather look of the movies, Morrison and Quitely outfitted the main team in black and grey. Rogue didn’t get one of those cool looks at the time (instead, she was running around in a horrendous red get-up), but it looks like the show will correct that error.

Apocalypse, Then

As the trailer reminds us, season 1 of X-Men ’97 ended with the destruction of Genosha—which took the life of Gambit, among others—and with half the team sent to the past and half to the future. The season two trailer shows what the team finds in each timeline: Apocalypse, first as Egyptian mutant En Sabah Nur and then, centuries from now, as the absolute ruler of Earth.

The trailer gives brief glimpses of En Sabah Nur with the Sandstormers, the tribe who recruits the future supervillain after his people exile him for having grey skin. The Sandstormers instill in En Sabah Nur a belief that only the fittest can survive, and he appears to be testing some poor victim in the trailer.

Eventually, En Sabah Nur will augment his abilities with a suit made from Celestial technology (you remember the Celestials, right? The giant purple god blowing things up in Guardians of the Galaxy? The big hand that started to come out of the Earth in Eternals?). Much later, he’ll conquer the world. And that’s where Cable comes in.

Cable Connections

The time-traveling leader of X-Force, Cable showed up in X-Men: The Animated Series, and at the end of X-Men ’97‘s first season, where we learned the character’s backstory. He was born Nathan Summers, son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey. Infected with an incurable virus by Mister Sinister, Nathan was sent into the far future with Bishop, another time traveler.

The season 2 trailer finds Cyclops and Jean Grey reuniting with their young son in the far future. There, Nathan will train to fight Apocalypse across time, gaining help from the Clan Aksani. Led by Mother Aksani (actually, an aged Rachel Summers, the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey from an alternate reality), Cable learns how to control the virus that turns his body into organic steel and gathers the arsenal he’ll use against Apocalypse.

The teenage version of Cable seen in the trailer sometimes resembles Nate Grey, an alternate reality version of Cable who once crossed time to make out with his mother, Marty McFly style, and another time became a Christ figure for the mutants. But that might be a little too weird for X-Men ’97.

The Death of Magik

If all of the Marvel Rivals servers have been shut down today, it’s because of something the players saw in the season 2 trailer: Colossus, cradling the body of his dead sister Illyana, a.ka. Magik. Before canceling your Disney+ subscription, remember that X-Men ’97 is still largely adapting storylines from the ’90s, and Magik wasn’t the major character then that she was now. In fact, she was dead, a casualty of the Legacy Virus.

A clunky AIDS metaphor, the Legacy Virus infected mutants throughout the ’90s, eventually ending when Beast invented a cure, which Colossus tested on himself. The cure worked, but did not end his sorrow over Magik’s death, and so Colossus briefly became a villain, joining the Acolytes. Given that Colossus has only had a few appearances in the Animated Series, he may be more of an antagonist in season 2—at least until his sister resurrects, like she always does.

Psylocke, Deadpool, and… the Draco?

Colossus isn’t the only big cameo in the trailer. Shapeshifter Morph takes the form of Deadpool and we see Rama-Tut, the Ancient Egyptian ruler who (stop me if you’ve heard this one) gets a time travel machine and becomes the Avengers villain Kang the Conquerer. Psylocke returns to the Animated Series, and will probably follow the current comic storylines, in which she’s no longer a white English woman in the body of an Asian woman (Google “Kwannon” and marvel at how long it took to reverse this plotline).

Two more notable additions are Exodus and Danger. Danger, a robot lady with a scary face, comes from the Joss Whedon run that followed Grant Morrison in 2004. The living embodiment of the Danger Room, the VR facility Xavier uses to train his students, Danger can adapt to any challenge and also is a pretty lady who wants others to validate her existence because she was created by Joss Whedon.

The caped swordsman Exodus is more complicated. Once a knight in 12th century France, the mutant known as Exodus was transformed into an undying warrior by Apocalypse, who then left him in captivity for refusing to obey him. Centuries later, Magneto freed Exodus, who has since worshiped the Master of Magnetism as a mutant savior.

But for longtime comics fans, the most compelling part of the trailer may be the depiction of Nightcrawler as a Catholic priest. Nightcrawler’s faith has long been a key part of his character, an ironic turn on his demonic appearance. He eventually became ordained as a priest, and started wearing a clerical collar with his costume, as seen in the trailer.

But in The Draco, a 2003 storyline by Chuck Austen and Takeshi Miyazawa, we learn that Nightcrawler looks like the devil because his dad is the devil. Or, more accurately, his father Azazel (you might remember him played by Jason Flemyng in X-Men: First Class), an ageless mutant on whom stories about Satan are based.

The Draco sucks for so many reasons, not least of all because it means that Nightcrawler is actually a monster and everyone was right to fear him. It would be daring for X-Men ’97 to take it on, but season one managed to redeem some bad storylines, so maybe they can do the same with The Draco.

Polaris, X-Factor, and Generation X

Judging by the marketing thus far, the most important new character in the season 2 trailer is Polaris, the green-haired lady seen looking at some photos. A longtime associate and sometime member of the X-Men, Polaris has the ability to control magnetism, just like Magneto—whom she learned late in life was her father.

Polaris also served on X-Factor, a mutant team sponsored by the U.S. government and led by Cyclops’s brother Havok. X-Factor has gone through many lineups, and marketing materials tend to show Polaris and Havok with the main team from the ’90s, alongside Strong Guy, Multiple Man, Quicksilver, and Wolfsbane. However, X-Factor eventually gains Forge and Shard, the sister of Bishop, as members.

Given that Forge and Bishop team up to find the time-displaced X-Men, Polaris could very well join them to form a different take on X-Factor. However, the trailer shows Polaris alongside Chamber, Monet, and Synch, all of whom were on the more youthful team Generation X, serving alongside Jubilee and under Emma Frost, who also appear in the trailer.

Whatever the line-ups in X-Men ’97, it’s clear that season 2 will draw inspiration from the comics, while going in its own unique direction.

X-Men ’97 season 2 debuts on Disney+ on July 1, 2026.