Marvel Animation’s 3-Year Plan: X-Men ’97, Zombies and Venom

Marvel Animation Showed Up to NYCC With Receipts

New York Comic Con is usually where Marvel teases things it will explain later. This year the animation side of the studio did something rarer: it handed over actual dates. Over the course of a single Thursday panel on the Empire Stage, Marvel Television and Marvel Animation laid out a three-year map for its animated corner of Disney+ — a finished season of X-Men ’97, a revived Marvel Zombies franchise, and a Spider-Man season that finally gets the symbiote story fans have been waiting for.

For a studio that has spent two years getting hammered over shrinking slates and quiet cancellations, the panel was a reminder that animation is quietly becoming the most reliable part of the Marvel machine.

X-Men ’97 Season 3 Finally Shows Its Hand

Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of television, animation, comics and franchise, screened the first footage from X-Men ’97 Season 3 for the roughly 3,000 fans in the room. The clip opens on graffiti scrawled across a wall: “Where are the X-Men?” It’s a fair question. The city has been locked down, borders closed, and mutants are being stopped at checkpoints unless they carry the right papers.

A young mutant tries to slip across anyway. She’s caught, branded a threat, and about to be taken into custody when a rescue team arrives. “Are you the X-Men?” she asks. “No, we’re the Brotherhood,” comes the answer. That single line tells you where the season is heading: the X-Men are missing, and somebody else has stepped into the vacuum.

The footage also cuts to Storm and Professor X sharing a car ride, comparing notes on a president who has made anti-mutant policy his platform — Graydon Creed, for anyone keeping score. They arrive at what turns out to be Gambit and Rogue’s wedding, where the guest list includes Deadpool, She-Hulk and Daredevil. It’s the kind of sequence that only works in animation, and it’s exactly why the show has become Marvel’s critical darling.

The season itself is already done. Winderbaum confirmed at San Diego Comic-Con over the summer that Season 3 is complete, and it lands on Disney+ in 2027. Season 2 wrapped its nine-episode run on August 12 with “Survival of the Fittest,” and the show spent most of the summer near the top of streaming charts worldwide. Season 4 is already in production with scripts being written.

Marvel Zombies Is Coming Back, Just Not as a Season

Here’s where Marvel got creative. Instead of ordering a conventional second season of Marvel Zombies, the studio is going with three annual two-part specials, each one dropping on Halloween. The franchise started as a single episode of What If…? before graduating to its own four-episode event in September 2025 — Marvel’s first TV-MA animated series, and a genuine ratings win for Disney+.

The specials are:

• Marvel Zombies: The Winter Soldier — Halloween 2027, picking up Bucky Barnes’ story
• Marvel Zombies: The Fist of Khonshu — Halloween 2028, a nod to Moon Knight’s patron deity
• Marvel Zombies: The Last Guardian — Halloween 2029, closing the run

Winderbaum teased that the first special answers where Bucky has been “during the adventure from last year,” and he flatly refused to name the Last Guardian, telling the room only that it’s “very, very exciting.” Director Bryan Andrews is back, and the team is reportedly around halfway through animatics on the first installment.

The annual-special format is a smart hedge. A four-episode event every year is cheaper and easier to market than a full season, and it lets Marvel keep the franchise alive without committing to a production calendar it can’t protect. It also means fans get something every Halloween for three straight years instead of waiting on a renewal decision.

Spider-Man Gets a Symbiote Problem in January

The most concrete news of the panel belonged to Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Season 2 arrives on Disney+ on January 13, 2027, and the teaser poster makes the pitch obvious: Peter Parker in the black suit, dwarfed by a symbiote insignia.

Marvel also confirmed that Josh Keaton — the voice of Peter Parker in The Spectacular Spider-Man — is playing Eddie Brock, which is about as loud a Venom confirmation as you can get without printing the word. Keaton already voiced Peter’s father, Richard Parker, in Season 1, so he’s now pulling double duty in the same universe.

Season 2 also brings in Gwen Stacy operating as Ghost-Spider, plus the Lizard, Rhino, Chameleon and Doctor Octopus. The first season premiered in January 2025 and reimagined Peter’s origin with Norman Osborn as his mentor instead of Tony Stark; the second season was originally penciled in for late 2026 before Marvel pushed it back. Winderbaum has said he wants the show on a yearly release model from here.

The Bigger Picture: Animation Is Carrying the Load

Read the three announcements together and a pattern shows up. Marvel Animation now has a fixed annual calendar: a Spider-Man season in January, an X-Men ’97 season on deck, and a Zombies special each Halloween. That is a release rhythm the live-action side hasn’t managed since the Disney+ era began.

The contrast inside the same panel was hard to miss. On the live-action front, Marvel confirmed that Daredevil: Born Again will end with its upcoming third season, and the room booed when the moderator brought it up. Charlie Cox took it in stride: “All I’ll say is, I imagine the ‘Save Daredevil’ campaign will be gearing up for round two.” That campaign worked once before, dragging the character back from Netflix cancellation purgatory into a Disney+ revival. Season 3, which has finished filming, will reunite the Defenders with Krysten Ritter, Mike Colter and Finn Jones returning. It arrives in 2027.

Marvel also unveiled the first logo for Zodiac, a live-action spy thriller headed to Disney+ in 2028, and put a firm date on the animation side of the ledger. For a studio that spent the past year being told it was running out of ideas, the message was clear enough: the ideas are in the cartoon department.

What This Actually Means for Your Watchlist

If you’re the type of viewer who tunes in for Marvel’s animated output, the next three years are now fully scheduled. Mark January 13, 2027 for Spider-Man. Expect X-Men ’97 Season 3 somewhere in 2027, with a finale that reportedly hands the story to a Brotherhood that isn’t the team you’re rooting for. And if you liked Marvel Zombies, you’re getting a Halloween tradition instead of a one-off.

The bigger question is whether Marvel can keep the quality up while expanding the volume. X-Men ’97 set an absurdly high bar by treating a Saturday-morning cartoon like prestige television, and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man matched it by giving Peter Parker a story that felt small and personal rather than universe-ending. Three specials and two returning series is a lot of plates to spin. But after years of watching live-action projects get rewritten mid-production, a studio that has finished seasons in the can before announcing them is a nice change of pace.

So which one are you actually clearing your calendar for — the mutants, the zombies, or the symbiote? For a lot of viewers, the honest answer is all three, and that is exactly what Marvel is counting on.