Simon Kinberg Compares X-Men Legion TV Series To Breaking Bad

Fox is currently developing two new TV series based on X-Men properties with Hellfire Club and Legion.

Now we get some details from X-Men writer/producer Simon Kinberg about the series as well as Gambit.

Regarding Gambit, Kinberg describes it as a “heist movie and a sexy thriller in a way.”

Kinberg told Collider the following about Legion and Hellfire Club, going so far as to compare Legion to Breaking Bad (yes, Kinberg was involved with Fantastic Four).

“Legion and Hellfire are both super active. Hellfire we’re hoping to be shooting at the beginning of next year, the pilot. It’s been extraordinary working with Noah Hawley [on Legion], who I think is a straight up genius. Actually the idea forLegion, it began in conversations with Lauren Schuler Donnerand Bryan Singer and Noah me, but I remember I was actually in Moscow last year about to go into a dinner, I was there for the Days of Future Past premiere, and I was sitting in a car outside a restaurant about to go into dinner. It was really early on in the process, like one of the first conversations, and Noah and I were on a call just the two of us just riffing ideas, and I was sitting outside what I thought was gonna be like a 10 minute call and I ended up sitting out there for three and a half hours, missing the dinner. Everybody had not only had the dinner but went home, and I just got off that call being like, ‘It’s midnight in Moscow but we have to make this show with this guy because he’s so brilliant.’ So that’s really ramping up now, the production’s ramping up to start shooting at the beginning of the year with FX.”

“I mean the thing that’s cool and that’s the hope in branching out to TV is that we can tell these X-Men stories in a slightly different way and even with a slightly different tone. It’s one of the thing we’re kind of doing in the different movie franchises. I mean Deadpool obviously has a very different, almost antithetical tone to the mainline X-Men movies. The X-Men movies are dramatic and almost operatic, whereas Deadpool is irreverent and hysterical and sort of a dirty R-rated comedy in many ways. And Gambit will have its own different flavor and tone to it, will be more of like a heist movie and a sexy thriller in a way. So the TV shows give us an opportunity to go even further and certainly what I’m seeing on Legion with Noah and FX is an intent to do something completely original in the genre, in some ways to sort of blow up the paradigm of comic book or superhero stories and almost do our Breaking Bad of superhero stories.”

“The Hellfire script we have an amazing writing team, really two writing teams working together on it, and also that will shoot next year.”