X-Men ’97 Season 2 opened to a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the most telling thing in the reviews isn’t the score.
It’s that more than one critic noticed the same thing: the new season feels less preachy than the first.
That makes Season 2 the latest sign that Marvel and Disney are quietly backing away from the message-first era that helped put the brand in a hole.
Critics Noticed The Shift
Across the first wave of X-Men ’97 Season 2 reviews, critics weren’t just praising the animation, action, and Apocalypse. Several also flagged a change in the writing itself.
RIOTUS critic Julian Lytle put it most directly, writing that compared to Season 1 the new episodes “feel less preachy and, at least for my taste, take fewer liberties” with the comics they’re adapting.
Other reviews framed the season as more faithful and more focused on the X-Men than on delivering a lesson. Marvel didn’t announce a course-correction. Disney didn’t issue a memo. Critics simply noticed one, and it’s worth asking why it’s showing up now.
While I haven’t been given the episodes to review, it’s something I pointed out myself:
Disney Already Started Scrubbing The Language
Over the past year, Disney has steadily stripped the language of its diversity push out of its own corporate paperwork.
The company removed its flagship “Reimagine Tomorrow” initiative and the “Disney Look” guidelines from its SEC filings. In its 2025 annual report, Disney also dropped the words “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “DEI” entirely, marking the first time that language had been absent since 2019. We covered that filing here.
CEO Bob Iger has also publicly said Disney shouldn’t be “agenda-driven,” and that its job is to entertain. Defenders can argue it’s a rebrand more than a reversal, and that’s a fair caveat. But the direction of travel is hard to miss.
Marvel Learned The Box Office Lesson The Hard Way
After Avengers: Endgame, Marvel entered the rockiest commercial stretch in studio history, and the cracks showed even in movies that opened huge.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness posted one of the biggest debuts in box office history in 2022, then cratered 67% in its second weekend — a steeper drop than Eternals or Shang-Chi — and limped to roughly $955 million, short of the billion-dollar bar its predecessors had made routine.
It also took heat over America Chavez, one of the MCU’s first openly LGBTQ characters.
From there, the disappointments got harder to spin. Again, Eternals (here’s why a sequel isn’t happening), and The Marvels became the lowest-grossing film in MCU history at roughly $206 million worldwide.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania stalled out around $476 million against mixed-to-negative word of mouth.
And She-Hulk: Attorney at Law turned into one of the most divisive things the studio ever streamed.
Marvel Is Going Back To The Hits
Now look at the pivot.
Marvel has thinned out its release slate, leaned back into its most bankable characters, and built its next two-part event — Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars — around exactly the kind of fan-service spectacle that made the brand massive in the first place, headlined by Robert Downey Jr.’s return as Doctor Doom.
Whatever you want to call it, the strategy no longer looks like it’s about sending the message. It looks like Marvel is trying to give the audience the thing it actually showed up for.
Which Brings Us Back To X-Men ’97
The lectures that defined parts of the revival’s first season — and drew real criticism, including from us — appear to have receded, with the mutants back at the center of their own show.
There are a few honest caveats. We don’t actually know who was responsible for Season 1’s direction. Was it Beau DeMayo, the showrunner fired right before the series premiered? Marvel? Disney? Nobody has ever said, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
The shift also may not be a clean purge. Morph, the single most divisive change of Season 1, is reimagined as gay and nonbinary and still returns in the Season 2 premiere. Also, don’t forget, Season 1 injected the use of woke pronouns, even though the series is set in an era that didn’t use them (the ’90s).
What looks different is the emphasis. The dial may have been turned down, not ripped out. And it’s still early. The 100% score rests on 13 reviews of four of nine episodes, and Season 1 also opened near-perfect with critics before settling at a softer 91% with fans.
Still, the trend line is hard to ignore. Disney has dropped the language, Marvel has dropped the strategy, and now critics say one of its flagship animated shows has dropped the sermons.
Whether you read that as a course-correction or a walk-back, X-Men ’97 Season 2 may be the clearest sign yet that Marvel’s message-first era is ending.
X-Men ’97 Season 2 premieres July 1 on Disney+. See our full review roundup here, and our complete X-Men ’97 coverage here.
