Professor Xavier’s son caused massive shakeups in mutant history and could shakeup the superhero genre on screen.
Fox and Marvel are working on two X-Men spinoff television series: Legion and Hellfire.
Legion by Fargo creator Noah Hawley as showrunner/writer is the story of David Haller, Professor X’s son code-named Legion. David is a mentally unstable young man with multiple personalities and each personality is in control of one of his multiple mutant powers which include telekinesis, telepathy and pyrokinesis.
Veteran X-Men producer Simon Kinberg compares the Legion project’s potential to a hit series of a very different genre.
“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.” Kinberg told Collider.
Here’s official description:
“The pilot introduces the story of David Haller: Since he was a teenager, David has struggled with mental illness. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he’s confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real.”
Haller was co-created by legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont during his New Mutants run. David recently starred in a short-lived solo series X-Men Legacy following his father’s death.
Legion’s most infamous comic book story. Haller’s plan to kill Magneto in the past backfired. Professor X died and the Age of Apocalypse alternate reality of a world with the Professor was born.
Both series will be executive produced by Bryan Singer, Lauren Shuler-Donner and Kinberg (the team behind the X-Men film franchise) and Marvel Head of Television Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory. Both projects are “in development” and not ordered as series yet.
By Editor