In 2026, Marvel and Mattel are both releasing projects designed to capitalize on people’s love for iconic animated heroes from their childhoods. Masters of the Universe has put a live-action He-Man on the big screen, and the second season of X-Men ’97 is about to fling some of Charles Xavier’s mutants into an apocalyptic future. Both projects were clearly made by people who love the source material, and they are similarly filled with nerdy Easter eggs meant to get hardcore fans hyped up. X-Men ’97 and Masters of the Universe are both nostalgia plays, but the biggest difference between the two — and arguably the reason one of them hasn’t been all that much of a success — is the work that has gone into keeping their respective characters and worlds alive in the pop culture consciousness.

In its second season, X-Men ’97 splits its team of mutant heroes up into multiple teams that find themselves stranded at drastically different points in history. While one group winds up in ancient Egypt, another is transported thousands of years into the future. Though both teams want to get back to the ’90s, they’re also desperately searching for a way to stop the virtually immortal mutant villain Apocalypse (Ross Marquand) from destroying the world. And because Apocalypse happens to be alive in both time periods, the two X-Men squads agree that it’s worth spending some time exactly where they are.

Rather than adapting a single storyline from Marvel’s comics, the new season of X-Men ’97 combines narrative elements from a number of different limited series — chief among them The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix from 1994 and 1996’s Rise of Apocalypse. Using beats from those specific comics to expand its story makes some sense given the ’90s of it all. But more surprising is the amount of relatively recent X-Men comics lore the show introduces in order to flesh out the world around its core characters.

While X-Men ’97 is a continuation of X-Men: The Animated Series, Marvel has made it feel fresh by reworking the established canon in significant ways. Taking that approach is part of what made the series a ratings hit when it first premiered in 2024, but fans’ long-standing fondness and familiarity with the X-Men were also key factors in the equation.

One of the main reasons that fans have been foaming at the mouth for new X-Men projects like ’97 and the upcoming X-Men MCU film is that Marvel has never really let this property fade into the background. Even though 20th Century Studios’ X-Men features tended to be terrible, there were always enough X-Men comics and TV series in the mix to give fans hope that a studio would eventually come up with something excellent. And if Marvel spent less time cultivating the X-Men’s brand, the franchise might have found itself floundering the way Mattel’s Masters of the Universe currently is.

There have been a handful of newer series inspired by the original Masters of the Universe cartoon. But on the whole, He-Man’s pop cultural prominence has waned in the years since Prince Adam and his friends were explaining the lessons behind their adventures on television every weekday from 1983 to 1985. This is likely part of why Mattel’s new Masters of the Universe movie has been underperforming at the box office since its release last week. So far, the movie has raked in a paltry $54.4 million against a $200 million production budget, making it a massive financial dud.

Masters of the Universe has become a case study in Hollywood’s tendency to learn the wrong lessons from its previous successes. People flocked to theaters to see Barbie because it was a funny, feminist deconstruction of an ever-present icon, but Mattel interpreted that a sign that viewers are hungry for stories about toys in general. Masters of the Universe attempts to do some mildly critical exploration of toxic masculinity, but that clearly hasn’t been enough to convince audiences to care about He-Man. Aside from hardcore fans, many people simply aren’t that invested in or emotionally connected to He-Man’s world, and Mattel hasn’t done enough to convince audiences that there’s anything interesting about this latest film.

If He-Man was a fixture in more people’s imaginations the way the X-Men are, the conversation around Masters of the Universe would likely be very different. Mattel would do well to internalize this as a valuable lesson, but there have yet to be signs of that being the case. Between X-Men ’97’s second season and Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel is rolling into a year of massive stories that put mutants front and center. And it’s a moment that the studio has been building toward for years.

The second season of X-Men ’97 hits Disney Plus on July 1st, and Masters of the Universe is in theaters now.