There has been rumblings on Pinside and elsewhere over the past several weeks that an upcoming Stern Pinball is based upon the Marvel cartoon series X-Men '97. Here's some more smoke to add to that fire...
Yesterday Arcade1Up accidentally leaked images of an upcoming arcade machine that it is making featuring special X-Men '97 art. The listing for the product, which showed a price of $499, only appeared on the Arcade1Up website for a short period of time before being taken down, but of course people captured the images of the new product (see below).
Clearly Disney is pushing the use of the X-Men '97 IP in new products. Stern Pinball has a very deep relationship with Disney. Stern recently made a game based on the Marvel IP Venom, so if we are getting new X-Men pinball machine I don't personally think that we are going to see it for a couple of games. Maybe X-Men '97 will be the third Stern Cornerstone of 2024? That's just speculation.
I would think that we will end up seeing what the second Stern cornerstone game of 2024 is (JAWS was the first) sometime around April. Rumors at this point include Pokemon, Dungeons & Dragons, John Wick and a remake of Metallica.
Speaking of X-Men '97, Marvel just dropped the official trailer for the upcoming Disney+ show this morning. The show is scheduled to debut on March 20th.
Borg should be next in line.