Marvel Animation dropped a second X-Men ’97 Season 2 trailer, and on its surface it’s a victory lap. It’s literally called “Roll Call.”
Wolverine kicks it off with “We’re back, baby,” the camera blitzes through the team, and Magneto closes it out with “Whatever forces await, we shall face them together.”
Count the names in the roll call: Professor X, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Forge, Beast, Nightcrawler, Morph, Bishop, Rogue, Wolverine, Storm, Jubilee, Sunspot, Archangel, Psylocke, Cable, Siryn, Strong Guy, Havok, Multiple Man, Wolfsbane, Emma Frost, Polaris, and Magneto.
It’s a small army, and it leans hard into the X-Factor corner of the X-books. Havok, Polaris, Strong Guy, Multiple Man, Wolfsbane, Siryn: that’s the classic X-Factor bench, almost wholesale. Stack Cable, Bishop, and Forge on top of it.
The new team the finale promised
Season 1 left everyone scattered across time: Rogue, Nightcrawler, Beast, Xavier, and Magneto stranded in 3000 B.C. Egypt, where they crossed paths with a young En Sabah Nur, and Cyclops and Jean Grey thrown into the far future alongside a young Cable.
Back in the present, Forge and Bishop were left holding the bag, building a checklist of mutants — some marked missing, some presumed dead — to assemble a fresh team and pull their time-lost friends home.
The Roll Call is essentially Marvel showing you who Forge and Bishop rounded up. The expanded roster isn’t fan service for its own sake, it’s the recruitment drive the finale set in motion, now cast and on screen.
The Age of Apocalypse endgame
None of this should surprise anyone who sat through the Season 1 mid-credits scene.
That stinger showed Apocalypse standing in the ruins of Genosha, picking up Gambit’s torn playing card and musing about all the death, the clearest possible tease that Gambit comes back as the Horseman Death.
Pair that with En Sabah Nur’s introduction in the past and a team fractured across three eras, and the Season 1 finale was openly steering toward an Age of Apocalypse adaptation. That’s been the read since May 2024.
So the question was never whether ’97 was flirting with Age of Apocalypse. It’s how far it commits. A full Apocalypse-conquered reality, or Apocalypse as the big bad while the team time-hops back together? A
stacked roster, a Magneto-vs-Apocalypse clash, Xavier calling Apocalypse “the X-Men’s most diabolical foe,” and Apocalypse himself promising “I will be all that is left” all point toward the deep end.
The cloud that hasn’t lifted
All of it still arrives under the shadow we covered when the first Season 2 trailer dropped: Beau DeMayo, the architect of Season 1, is gone, stripped of his Season 2 credits and spending the better part of a year warning fans that Marvel reworked the season he built.
Worth watching on that front: the first two trailers lean almost entirely on action and roster, with none of the character beats that defined — and, for some viewers, divided — Season 1.
That might be marketing picking spectacle over nuance, the safe play for a montage. Or it might hint at a tonal reset under the new creative team that revised DeMayo’s scripts. The trailers can’t answer that. July 1 will.
Watch the trailer:
