Last summer Fox was moving ahead on two different X-Men TV shows. One was Legion, which is due to hit FX soon and looks pretty good. The other was Hellfire, which would have followed a version of the villainous Hellfire Club. Well, Hellfire got canceled before it ever got going, and another untitled series was picked up in its place. We haven't heard a lot about it, except that it will follow a family that must go on the run when the teenage kids develop mutant powers, but now showrunner Matt Nix has revealed some details to Collider, and it looks like it will differ from Legion in a significant way.
Unlike Legion, which stars Dan Stevens as Daniel Haller, the son of Charles Xavier, Nix's series will actually have connections to the X-Men movie-verse. But based on what Nix has to say, those connections sound tenuous at best...
“Without getting into specifics that I’ll get murdered for, I would say that a fan of the movies — particularly the movies but also the comic books — would not be disoriented as to where this fits in the mythology. If you look at the movies that take place, they don’t all line up perfectly. So it’s not like I’m slavishly fitting myself into a particular slot [but] if you like that world and the world of the movies, there are definite nods to it, it definitely exists in the same general universe.”
So what does that mean, exactly? To me it sounds like it will simply take place in the same universe without directly referencing anything specific. To that end, don't expect to see any familiar X-Men running around...
"In a sort of general way, it acknowledges that events like those that happened in the movie have happened. It’s still evolving, so we’ll see how much that comes in. But it’s certainly not like ‘since this happened X-Men Apocalypse, now all of these things are happening,’ which I think is cool but [Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.] already did that...“Without getting into specifics, it’s sort of designed to side-step questions like ‘Where is Wolverine?’ So you sort of have to answer those questions, and I didn’t want to do anything like ‘Wolverine is just offscreen!’ You know what I mean. So it exists in a world where those questions are answered without needing to name a lot of names or spend time dwelling on that issue.” “So within that, there are a certain amount of those characters I can use, and I’m using some of those, but others I’m inventing. But everything is invented with a nod towards the existing mythology. When I was pitching the show, I pitched some characters that appear nowhere in the mythology, but the guys from Marvel, when I started describing them, all gave each other knowing nods. It was like ‘Oh I see what he’s doing, yes.’ So I tried to do a lot of that. I didn’t want to get into the realm of too much ‘Yep! New X-Men here we go!’ because with this there’s a little bit of fan service.”
You know how these things go. There may not be any big crossover plans, but eventually we will start to see more connections to the movies, which are too popular to totally avoid. Playing in that sandbox is too tempting, I think.
