Although X-Men ’97 is a direct continuation of X-Men: The Animated Series, one of the best animated TV shows of all time, unlike its predecessor, this Marvel offering among the best Disney+ TV shows could not air during a Saturday morning block. While certainly not going into hard R territory, this latest X-Men project has been more loose when it comes to adult material, particularly violence. This was arguably best demonstrated at the end of the episode “Tolerance is Extinction - Part Two,” when Magneto used his metal-manipulating powers to rip the adamantium from Wolverine’s skeleton. But figuring out just how much blood could be shown in this scene wasn’t easy to figure out, as director Emi/Emmett Yonemura informed CinemaBlend.
Following the X-Men ’97 Season 1 finale, titled “Tolerance is Extinction - Part 3,” dropping to Disney+ subscribers, I had the pleasure of speaking with Yonemura and fellow director Chase Conley, and with the former having helmed the season’s penultimate episode, I had to know if there were any concerns about going too far with that shocking Wolverine moment or if there were any negotiations about how much could be shown. Yonemura told me:
Yeah, there are scenes that have been cut. We always knew we were TV-14, but how do you rip the adamantium out of somebody and try and make that anything less. But because it was so important to comics and because it's adamantium, we can have a little bit of blood in our show. We just can't go insane. So it was boarded by Jalin Harden, and there was a really cool black and white, almost like explosive silhouette shot that even formed an X, it was really cool. But because even though in silhouette, it was just like, ‘That's just gonna make our imaginations think that he just exploded.’ We're like, ‘Ok, we'll pull back.’ Even the stabbing of Magneto in that moment. There's a lot of blood there, and at some point it was like, ‘Well I know we got to balance this and make it kind of TV safe, but at the same time, somebody's getting stabbed.’ So I think it was just a matter that of making sure we were at least hitting the comic book level so that we could justify it, especially to our execs. But I mean, it's got to hurt.
Although Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine got his skeleton pulled around by Magneto in several of the X-Men movies, having the Master of Magnetism outright rip it off his skeleton in X-Men ’97 is on another level. Now to be fair, Magneto did this in response to Wolverine stabbing him with his claws, so it’s not like retaliation wasn’t warranted. But as Emi/Emmett Yonemura explained, going the silhouette route would have left too much to the imagination, so they instead went with the final product, which was more explicit with this horrific act, yet didn’t go far enough to turn this into a gore fest. It was a tricky balance to hit, but the show’s team pulled it off.
During the X-Men ’97 Season 1 finale, Wolverine was barely hanging on, and Morph stayed by his bedside as the final round of action unfolded on Asteroid M. As if that wasn’t bad enough, by the end of the episode, Cyclops and Jean Grey met a Gates McFadden voiced Mother Askani and a adolescent version of Nathan Summers in 3960 AD; Beast, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Professor X and Magneto met En Sabah Nur, who will one day become Apocalypse, in ancient Egypt in 3000 BC; and Jubilee is still in 1997 with Sunspot. But Wolverine, Morph and Storm’s whereabouts are unknown. Where did they end up, and will Wolverine be able to properly heal from what Magneto did to him even with his impressive regenerative ability?
We won’t learn those answers until X-Men ’97 Season 2 hits Disney+ at a yet-to-be-announced date. While we wait for that information and other details about the next batch of episodes, feel free to look at the other upcoming Marvel TV shows or figure out what to watch now with the 2024 TV schedule.
