X-Men ’97 Director Reveals Hope for Avengers vs X-Men in Marvel’s Animated Universe: “As Fans, We All Want That” [EXCLUSIVE]

Without question, one of the best new things to come from Marvel Studios in the 2020s has been the revival of X-Men: The Animated Series with the universally acclaimed X-Men ’97. Though the series picked up where that original show left off and has been blazing an all-new path with X-Men stories from the comics that hadn’t even been published yet, it’s doing even more than that. Not content to just play in the X-Men sandbox, characters from across the Marvel roster have been showing up for surprise cameos (sometimes as Morph pretending to be them and sometimes the real thing).

Among those heroes are Spider-Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Iron Man, and Black Panther, confirming that the entire Marvel Universe is all there. Speaking with ComicBook in a new interview, X-Men ’97 director and supervising producer Jake Castorena teased that he specifically wanted to see these two corners come together. When we asked if there was another Marvel team he’d like to bring to life in animation, his answer was surprising: “I would love to do…Brad (Winderbaum) don’t hate me…,” Castoerna teased. “But I would love if we could ever build an X-Men versus Avengers crossover. I think that would just…I think as fans, we all want that.”

Marvel fans will seemingly get at least a taste of something like this when Avengers: Doomsday arrives this December, but Marvel expanding their animated universe to have a conflict of this size would be something fans would be thrilled to see come to life. The two teams have come to blows more than once in the pages of the comics, including, of course, the 2012 crossover event Avengers vs. X-Men. This would be huge not only for the team dynamics it could bring to life, but also for further expansion of the Marvel characters that have only appeared in a handful of moments.

Keeping his fingers crossed for Avengers vs. X-Men isn’t the only thing that Castorena would like to expand in the world of X-Men ’97, adding that “getting to expand the X-Force roster would be really rad,” but also noting doing a revival of the Fantastic Four in the same style would be pretty easy for the team after years of making the X-Men.

“It would be cool to tackle the FF. Since X-Men is fundamentally a triangle of drama, family squabbles, and representing other larger-than-life ideas and concepts like prejudice and found family. So, I feel like Fantastic Four would be a fun addition to that because we already work on the family dynamic so much, so it would be curious to juggle that dynamic between them.”

X-Men ’97 debuts new episodes on Disney+ every Wednesday, with two episodes left in Season 2.