X-Men ’97 Season 2 is a triumph — we gave the three-episode premiere a 10/10, critics have it at a perfect 100% — and it’s a massive leap over an uneven first season.
And right on cue, the comment sections have picked their hero: Beau DeMayo, the fired showrunner, is getting credit for the season from fans who note he wrote it before Marvel showed him the door.
Others counter that the season only soars because Marvel reworked his material after he left.
So whose season is it? The honest answer is on the record — including in DeMayo’s own words — and it’s messier than either camp wants it to be.
What’s Undeniably DeMayo’s
Start with what nobody disputes.
DeMayo had finished writing Season 2 before he was fired in March 2024, the scripts were done, and animatics for the entire season existed by the time he left.
The story you’re watching traces to him: Marvel Animation’s Brad Winderbaum has admitted bringing in Apocalypse “was always part of Beau’s pitch,” and Winderbaum said outright that the team was “honoring Beau’s ideas for the second season.”
The time-scattered team, the Egypt storyline, the Apocalypse endgame, that’s DeMayo’s architecture.
It’s why he retains his credits as creator, executive producer, and writer on the season, per IMDb and Vanity Fair‘s recent reporting. Anyone saying DeMayo deserves credit for Season 2’s story is standing on solid ground.
What Isn’t — By His Own Admission
But here’s the part the credit-DeMayo camp skips, and it comes straight from DeMayo himself.
After his firing, he told fans on X: “I did write a lot of Season 2. However, unlike Season 1, I will not be heavily involved or leading production, cast records, design, editorial, post, music, etc., nor doing any production rewrites as it relates to the creative vision of the show.”
Read that list again.
Production. Editorial. Post. Music. And critically: production rewrites.
In television — animation especially — that’s where a show actually gets made. And Season 2’s scripts didn’t sit untouched after he left: they had reportedly been revised and rewritten by July 2024, with Matthew Chauncey, the What If…? writer Marvel hired as the show’s new head writer, overseeing the rewrites.
The season also credits five other writers alongside DeMayo — JB Ballard, Bailey Moore, Antony Sellitti, Brian Ford Sullivan, and Mariah Wilson — with Jake Castorena serving as supervising producer over the finished product.
The Real Difference Is Tone, Pacing, And Dialogue
This distinction matters because of what kind of improvement Season 2 shows. The leap isn’t in the premise, the premise is DeMayo’s.
It’s in the execution: the tone, the pacing, the dialogue, what gets emphasized and what gets a single line instead of a soapbox.
Critics have picked up on exactly this, with reviews calling the season less preachy and more faithful to the comics than Season 1.
We’ve lived that contrast ourselves: our Season 1 reviews ran mixed-to-negative in large part over exactly those tendencies, while the premiere earned our first 10/10.
Through the premiere, the identity-forward material that divided audiences last time has receded. Morph, reimagined in Season 1 as nonbinary and confirmed by DeMayo as harboring feelings for Wolverine, is barely a presence in the opening three episodes.
Tone, emphasis, and dialogue are precisely the things that get shaped in production rewrites, editorial, and post, the layer DeMayo, by his own statement, had nothing to do with.
The Claim That Didn’t Age
There’s one more wrinkle worth remembering.
Back in September 2024, DeMayo reportedly claimed that Marvel’s rework had cut his Onslaught and Age of Apocalypse material from the season.
Then episode 3 premiered — literally titled “Rise of Apocalypse – Part I” — kicking off an arc that seems to be headed toward the Age of Apocalypse that the Season 1 finale set up.
Maybe plans changed back after he said it. Maybe his information was secondhand by then. Either way, the season on screen doesn’t exactly match his account of what Marvel supposedly gutted, a useful reminder that DeMayo’s version of what happened to Season 2 comes from someone who, again by his own description, was locked out of the room where it was finished.
Season 2 Is A DeMayo Story With A Different Execution
So give credit where it’s actually due — to both sides, uncomfortably.
DeMayo built the blueprint: the Apocalypse arc, the time-fractured structure, the season’s spine (all from the comics, BTW).
The team that finished it — Chauncey’s rewrites, Castorena’s production, the writers’ room that stayed — shaped it into the version that’s earning perfect scores, with a tonal discipline Season 1 never had.
The season everyone’s praising, so far, seems to be a DeMayo story told the way DeMayo wasn’t telling it.
We may never know the entire inside story, but Marvel goes to trial in July 2027, where more of the production story could come out.
X-Men ’97 Season 2 is streaming on Disney+, with new episodes weekly through August 12. For more, see our 10/10 premiere review, our look at how the season fits Marvel’s wider shift, and our complete DeMayo coverage.
