Phoenix/Jean Grey

I’m all for Marvel’s penchant for humanizing its otherworldly humans in grounded storytelling, but I still want destruction on a multiversal scale. Wandavision is one of my favorite Marvel TV series because the entire show took place in a manifestation of Wanda’s reality-warping powers. There are few entities in comic book history as fearsome as the Phoenix Force, especially when master telepath Jean Grey is its host. This cosmic entity’s true powers have never been properly depicted in a movie yet, definitely not in the god-awful X-Men: The Last Stand which portrayed the universal threat its heroes face as some repressed memory of Jean Grey’s. By the time we got to Dark Phoenix in 2019, the Phoenix Force was given a bit more respect, but still left a lot to the imagination that a TV series could do justice.

My first introduction to this indomitable force was in X-Men: The Animated Series when Jean Grey was flying around in a cosmic, flaming bird-like avatar and once blew up an entire planet by absorbing its sun’s energy because the Phoenix Force was hungry. Since X-Men ‘97 is a continuation of X-Men: The Animated Series, we may not see Phoenix appear again. But, she’s rebonded with the Phoenix numerous times in the comics, so anything is possible.