X-Men ’97 Directors Were Happy to “Stick the Landing” With Season 1 Finale

Chase Conley and Emi/Emmett Yonemura break silence on Season 1’s conclusion.

The first season of X-Men ’97 is now in the books, culminating an epic series of episodes. The Disney+ series told its own grand narrative without being completely divergent from the canon of X-Men: The Animated Series, all while building to a jaw-dropping finale. While speaking to ComicBook about their work on the first season, X-Men ’97 episodic directors Chase Conley and Emi/Emmett Yonemura shared their thoughts on how Season 1 ultimately wrapped up.

“We’re just happy to stick the landing,” Conley revealed in our interview, which you can check out above. “I think that we had a lot of storylines that we wanted to try to wrap up, but really, we planned for all that stuff anyway, so it was really just about executing. And the main theme of our season, I think from Episode One all the way to Episode Ten was escalation. And Episode Five is peak level. It’s like, ‘How do we escalate from here on an emotional level?’ But there’s a lot of things that we set up that we needed to pay off that, I still think, hit just as hard. I mean, of course, seeing Gambit die is, it is hard to rival that as far as just a guttural kind of reaction. But it’s nice to see Xavier rejoin the team. It’s nice to see the world, how they view essentially what they perceive to be the X-Men lying about his death in order to garner sympathy from the world. And how his reemergence, in terms of the scheme of things, has a ripple effect as far as extremists and things of that nature. And also too, it’s not just the typical upping the stakes, in terms of it’s going to get bigger and scarier and the world is going to end. But it’s truly earned, as far as everything goes. And nothing would radicalize someone like being ground-level, witnessing millions of people like you, that are just trying to live their lives, be murdered. You may want to go up and consider destroying the Earth if you had the opportunity. Righteous indignation is a thing.”

“Oh, it was just intense,” Yonemura echoed. “I just watched it as a fan, a fan of Chase, a fan of his team. But just getting to watch it and just see where that episode goes. It was just like, ‘Oh, it’s so intense!’ It’s amazing.”

Is X-Men ’97 Renewed for Season 2?

Work has already begun on a sophomore season of X-Men ’97, which was already renewed by Marvel Animation prior to the show’s premiere.

“It’s still an animatic phase. Animation takes so long to make as I’m sure you know. There was a great bit about this in Invincible Season 2,” X-Men ’97 Executive Producer and Marvel Studios Head of TV, Streaming, and Animation Brad Winderbaum explained to ComicBook in a recent interview. “They just nailed it so hard, it is the greatest. And it takes a long time. Because the studio wants to see how successful the first season is before they greenlight the second season there’s a lag. We were lucky enough to get the greenlight before we aired so there’s maybe less of a lag. People are just going to have to be patient with us.

The first season of X-Men ’97 is now available to stream exclusively on Disney+. If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.