The X-Men have landed on Disney+ with all the force of a particularly well-crafted optic blast. Disney has revealed that X-Men ‘97’s premiere on the streamer last week has smashed records for the platform—and it’s not just helping out the new show, either.
This week Disney confirmed (via Deadline) that the opening two-episode premiere of the new series was viewed four million times across the first five days it was available on Disney+. That now makes X-Men ‘97 the platform’s most successful debut for what the studio calls a “full-length animated series” since Marvel’s first animated project for the streamer, What If?. It should be noted that that description weaves around a few caveats for animation on Disney+; “full-length” here does not count series like Star Wars: Visions or Zootopia+, or even Marvel’s own I Am Groot anthology, but does compare X-Men ‘97 to the likes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch or the recent launch of the afrofuturist series Iwájú. But either way, it’s a case in point that the series has made the exact kind of huge waves Marvel would like for what is its first real media project with the X-Men since the re-acquisition of their adaptation rights in the Disney/Fox merger.
But X-Men ‘97 hasn’t just done well for itself, but its predecessor too. Disney notes that since the first trailer for the new show released last month, streams of the classic X-Men: The Animated Series—which ‘97 is a direct continuation of—have shot up by over five hundred percent, as people raced to catch up in time for the new series’ arrival. Suffice to say, between this and the comics re-aligning a new age of X-Men storytelling to include elements evocative of the classic ‘90s show and team makeup—the decade is truly back in style for the X-Men, regardless of whether it’s on-screen or in the pages of the comics.
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