Why X-Men: Evolution Was Canceled, According To Its Co-Creator
"X-Men: The Animated Series" remains to this day the pinnacle of Marvel TV — both animation and live-action. It told serialized yet still self-contained stories that adapted classic comic storylines with depth, great action, and fantastic character work.
After that show ended, we got the vastly underrated yet still quite excellent "X-Men Evolution," a show that took a smaller approach that focused on character rather than big world-ending epics. The show reimagined most of the main characters as teenagers, with creator Robert N. Skir once telling Conventional Relations that he wanted "a show about a bunch of kids who are trying really hard not to be superheroes" with the high school setting giving the writers more opportunities to explore the anti-mutant prejudice and discrimination from the comics.
It was a great show, one that gave us incredible references to "Buffy" and "The Craft" that continue to go viral to this day, and a show that even impacted the source material, with the show-original character of X-23 later being introduced in the comics (and making the jump to live-action in "Logan").
But as good as "X-Men Evolution" was, it didn't last forever. The show got canceled after season 4 in 2003. When asked why the show got the can, Skir speculated that. "So many shows were changing back then because Nickelodeon was so strong and getting so much of an audience," Skir said. "If you look at the kind of shows they replaced 'X-Men' with, you get a sense that it was time for the network to move on to a different kind of show. I don't think it was a lack of faith in the series. I think it was more of a business aesthetic kind of decision."
The times were changing
Skir isn't wrong in his speculation. Looking at the Kids' WB lineup at the time, it becomes clear that the programming block mostly stopped acquiring titles around the time "X-Men Evolution" ended. After 2003, Kids' WB slowed down their output significantly, and other than "Pokémon," they mostly focused on original programming as well as Cartoon Network rebroadcasts at the time.
Indeed, even more so than a pivot in the type of stories they were telling, Kids' WB as a programming block was already on the way out. Around this time, Kids' WB was facing a problem that similar animated programming blocks like Fox Kids and 4Kids faced — affiliates backing out because of the perceived notion that kids were only watching cable in the afternoon. By 2005, Kids' WB stopped airing its programming block on weekdays, and a year later their Saturday morning block merged with The CW on basic cable, before disappearing altogether. So in a way, "X-Men Evolution" was a victim of an even larger business pivot, of the end of an era in children's programming.
And it is a shame, too, because the proposed fifth season of "X-Men Evolution" was meant to adapt the Dark Phoenix Saga, using the four seasons' worth of character development to give that story arc more depth than perhaps we've seen in any other adaptation.