Marvel and Fox recently announced two X-Men TV series with Legion and the Hellfire Club. Regarding the former, which features Professor Xavier’s schizophrenic son David Haller, showrunner Noah Hawley recently offered up some details while speaking with TV Insider including that the series will start shooting at the end of January or the beginning of February.
Probably the biggest eye-opener about the press release was the absence of “X-Men” or “mutants,” and Hawley offers up the reasoning, at least in regards to his Legion TV series.
It’s interesting; I do think that the show needs to stand on its own two feet. The people who care that it’s an X-Men title are going to know it’s an X-Men title. You’re looking for the largest possible and most diverse audience, so that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the show itself.
It’s also wondered how both shows will tie into the X-Men movie universe — if at all.
[Legion is] conceived more as a standalone. I don’t want to say too much more about it on that level, but certainly it’s not constructed as a back-door anything. It’s more just that there’s a story that I want to explore that has to fit into that larger universe, which is exciting.
Hawley continues with mention that Legion will basically stand on its own while also hinting that Hellfire Club may be tied more to the movie universe.
We certainly haven’t had any conversations about crossovers. I don’t know anything about it, but I think that one is more linearly taken out of the world of the movies. Ours has its own world to it.
The interview also reveals that Fox does own the X-Men TV rights, but did have to work things out with Marvel.
It’s been in the works for a long time. Some of that was Marvel dealmaking process. Fox has rights to make movies and sort of tacitly the rights to do TV, but they’ve never done it before so they had to work out all the details.
FX Productions is the lead studio. My relationship is with FX primarily, and I’m just getting to know Jeph Loeb and the people at Marvel, and I think it’s going to be collaboration in the best sense.
Hawley also offers what he likes about Legion and offers a possible direction of the series:
What I really like about him is, here’s a character who is schizophrenic on some level, a character struggling with mental illness. Is he crazy or does he have these powers? The answer is, kind of both. I’m a big believer that the structure of a story should reflect the content of the story. And so I liked the idea that if you have a character that doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not real, that is also the audience’s journey.
