X-Men '97 season 3 release date set for 2027 — and the Deadpool teaser drops Marvel's most R-rated hero into a Saturday-morning cartoon

X-Men '97 season 3 arrives on Disney+ in 2027. Marvel confirmed the window at New York Comic Con, where Brad Winderbaum, head of Marvel Television, Animation, Comics and Franchise, presented the first teaser on October 10 — and the teaser buried the lede in the guest list. Among the attendees at Gambit and Rogue's wedding: She-Hulk, making her first Disney+ appearance since her own 2022 series, and Deadpool, officially joining the animated X-Men universe for the first time.

"Officially" is doing real work in that sentence. In the original 1990s series and again in season 2, Deadpool appeared only as a gag, through Morph's shapeshifting or mental illusions. The cameo was Marvel's running joke about the character they couldn't quite use. Now he's just there, in the pews, in a TV-14 nostalgia show, while his live-action self remains the franchise's only R-rated property. Deadpool & Wolverine made $1.3 billion in 2024; Deadpool 4 is announced with no release date. The animation side will get Wade Wilson on screen before the movie side does.

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Nobody has said who voices him. Ryan Reynolds showed up in the Deadpool suit at Marvel's San Diego Comic-Con presentation in July and has been hinting at a return, which is either an answer or a very Reynolds way of not giving one.

What else the teaser showed

• The Brotherhood: Mystique leads the Brotherhood of Mutants, who get the teaser's mic-drop. A girl asks her rescuers, "Are you the X-Men?" The reply: "No, we're the Brotherhood."
• The presidency: Creed is now in the White House, and Storm and Professor X spend part of the teaser in a car discussing the conflict with the U.S. government.
• The wedding: Gambit and Rogue, with Namor also spotted among the guests.
• The future: season 4 is already in development.

A quick reminder about the groom, for anyone keeping score: Gambit died in season 1, episode 5, and the show spent a good chunk of its run clawing him back. The wedding is the payoff for the franchise's single most traumatizing episode.

The groom of 2027's biggest animated wedding spent part of this show dead. By X-Men standards, that's a stable foundation for a marriage.

The gap math

Season 1 ran March to May 2024 and landed a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, surviving even the firing of creator Beau DeMayo days before launch. Season 2 took 26 months to follow, airing July 1 to August 12, 2026, at 97%. The good news for the season 3 wait: Winderbaum said back during season 2's final production stretch that season 3's animation was already largely complete, which is why Marvel can promise 2027 with a straight face and talk about a yearly schedule going forward. For a franchise whose live-action movie side currently has exactly one dated X-Men project, the show drawn in a thirty-year-old style is somehow the most reliable thing Marvel mutants have.

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