State Champ Radio X-Men
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Source: Marvel / Disney+
It’s only been a few days since Disney+ premiered the highly anticipated animated series, X-Men ’97, and already the numbers are showing it’s a massive hit amongst ’80s babies.
According to Deadline, the two premier episodes of X-Men ’97 set a record for Disney+ as it became the most viewed animated series on the platform since Marvel’s What If…? debuted in 2021. In the first five days of X-Men’s March 20 premier, the show garnered more than 4 million views worldwide as fans tuned in to see their favorite mutants back in action after decades of being off the air. Not a bad look for a show that mainly targeted people in their 30s and 40s who grew up watching the series when it was a hot commodity on Fox’s Saturday morning cartoon lineup.
Per Deadline:
Disney defines a view as hours viewed divided by runtime. Each episode of X-Men ’97 is about 30 minutes long.
Also, views across all 5 seasons of the original 1992 X-Men animated series increased by 522% since the X-Men ’97 trailer launched on February 15.
X-Men ’97 is a revival of the classic ’90s animated series. Written by Beau DeMayo, X-Men ’97 revisits the iconic era of the 1990s as The X-Men, a band of mutants who use their uncanny gifts to protect a world that hates and fears them, are challenged like never before, forced to face a dangerous and unexpected new future.
Now that the show is a certified hit, it will be interesting to see how Marvel and Disney move forward as they fired the show’s creator, Beau DeMayo, just a few weeks ago for reasons unknown. Will they bring in a new team to steer that ship, or will they move on to new X-Men projects altogether?
Guess we’ll have to wait and find out.
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Disney+’s highly anticipated animated series X-Men ’97 hasn’t even premiered on the streaming network yet, but already there’s been a major shakeup with its production team.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the series creator, writer and producer, Beau DeMayo, was unexpectedly fired from the show just weeks before it was set to premiere on Disney+ and left everyone scratching their heads at the sudden move from Marvel. The decision comes just weeks after DeMayo had finished writing the second season of X-Men ’97 and was already pondering ideas for a third season with his writing team.
As of now, Marvel hasn’t given any reason for the sudden firing of DeMayo who’s also written for the live-action series Moon Knight and was also working on Blade, but best believe we’ll be all ears once they do because this really took the comic book world by surprise.
Per The Hollywood Reporter:
It was [sic] surprising turn of events on the eve of the show’s March 20 debut. Splitting with writers is a normal part of business for Marvel or any studio. However, it is unusual for a top creative on a Marvel project to miss a premiere or cancel press plans last minute, even if they’ve been shuffled to the side. Most Marvel premieres feature multiple screenwriters walking the red carpet, some of whom had been rewritten by other writers also walking the carpet.
Marvel announced DeMayo’s hiring in November 2021. The move was met with some level of excitement, as the scribe brought his identity as a gay Black man to the project, and made it a point in talking to the press about how growing up as the adopted son to white parents with a Korean sister in the South made the X-Men characters — and their struggles for acceptance by society — feel personal to him.
His silence on social media has been acute as he was a prolific poster, sharing X-Men tidbits as well as shirtless pictures of himself at the gym. For a time he also ran a non-explicit Only Fans account, all of which inspired the LGBTQ publication Out to declare him “the Sexy, Gay Marvel Writer & Showrunner to Know.”
Neither Marvel nor DeMayo have responded for comments about the firing but in show business it’s only a matter of time before things leak and rumors swirl around such events. We just hope it was creative differences or something along those lines and nothing more displeasing.
Lord knows it wasn’t easy for DeMayo to have taken on the task of reviving the beloved X-Men animated series as he was attacked online by users who accused him of Whitewashing the character of Sunspot by casting Brazilian actor Gui Agustini to voice the character in the series. It’s a damn VoiceOver role, man, but still it led to DeMayo deactivating his Twitter account for his own mental health.
And now this. SMH.
What do y’all think of Beau DeMayo’s departure from Marvel? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Source: Marvel / Disney+
The Marvel Cinematic Universe might be struggling in popularity at the moment (Deadpool & Wolverine has the potential to change that come this summer). But Disney sure does have comic book fans in a frenzy over their upcoming series and shows and had the internet buzzing when they dropped the first trailer to the highly anticipated X-Men ’97.
Decades after FOX’s X-Men went off the air, Disney+ is bringing back the beloved animated series and picking up where it left off in 1997 when Professor X bid farewell to his mutant family in the series finale. With Cyclops at the helm of the team, the OG X-Men team of Wolverine, Storm, Gambit, Rogue, Beast, Jean Grey and Jubilee will continue to take the fight to any and everyone who poses a threat to the world. Though no villains other than the Sentinel’s were shown, you can bet your bottom dollar that some of your favorite mutant baddies such as Apocalypse, Sabretooth, and Mr. Sinister will pop up throughout the series.
Featuring old school animation and the original score that 80’s babies grew to love on Saturday mornings, the new trailer promises to take us back to a time when a dollar could fetch you a bag of chips, a quarter juice and a Phillies blunt. We. Can’t. Wait.
X-Men ’97 is set to hit Disney+ on March 20. Will you be tuning in? Let us know in the comments section below.
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With much hype surrounding the eventual introduction of the X-Men into the now struggling Marvel Cinematic Universe and what role they’ll play in the forthcoming Avengers: Secret Wars film, many assumed that Patrick Stewart’s Professor X wouldn’t be a part of the MCU’s future due to his death in Doctor Strange 2.
Well, that may not be the case. During an interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Patrick Stewart spoke about Professor X’s fate in the Marvel Universe. He left everyone with a glimmer of hope that we’d once again see arguably the most powerful mutant in the world once again roll alongside the X-Men.
Though we’ve seen Professor X take a few fatalities over the decades in films such as X-Men: The Last Stand and more recently, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Patrick Stewart told Horowitz that he has “every confidence” in the notion that Professor X is “still around” somewhere in the MCU. In saying that alone, one has to figure that he’s had talks with Marvel Studios to reprise his role as Charles Xavier at some point in the future.
Continuing to talk about his cameo in Doctor Strange, Stewart also admitted that he found it to be “frustrating and disappointing” as the film was shot during the COVID pandemic and everything was filmed with everyone else’s safety in mind. “I was alone. I think that the big scene, each one of the leading actors had the same experience. They were shot on their own.”
Hopefully we’ll see Professor X alongside Wolverine, Spider-Man and other MCU stars alongside each other in a future project at some point. Lord knows the MCU can use that kind of boost to put butts in seats at the movie theaters like they used to in their heyday.
Check out Patrick Stewart talk about his experience on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness below, and let us know if you’d like to see him as Professor X one more time (or more) in the comments section below.
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