Once the dust settled from Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse, and barring the progress made through Legion and James Mangold’s Logan, fans were left wondering where 20th Century Fox would take its flagship franchise next. A soft reboot was reportedly in the mix, but as time wore on, the studio began to make serious headway on a live-action TV series rooted in the X-Men universe.
Pitched as a family drama, Fox quickly drafted in Burn Notice creator Matt Nix to write, produce and generally oversee development, and today we have official confirmation that the as-yet-untitled action-adventure drama has landed a pilot order at the studio. Hatched in collaboration with Marvel Television, Nix’s project chronicles the story of “two ordinary parents who discover their children possess mutant powers. Forced to go on the run from a hostile government, the family joins up with an underground network of mutants and must fight to survive.”
Preliminary casting is now underway, and it’s understood Fox’s embryonic family drama will hold stronger ties to the underlying X-Men universe when compared to the imminent Legion. Series creator Noah Hawley, who struck gold on FX with his acclaimed Fargo series, has long expressed his desire to carve out a totally new origin story, one that doesn’t tread on the toes of Fox’s film series. The same is true for the X-Men film franchise, after producer Lauren Shuler Donner stressed that future movies won’t take heed of what’s going on on the small screen.
Fox’s X-Men TV series is finally moving forward, and a pilot order represents an exciting platform on which to build momentum. Legion, on the other hand, will expand Fox’s universe in a totally new – and downright bizarre – direction when Noah Hawley’s series premieres on February 8th.
