X-Men Spinoff Legion Won’t Feature Characters From The Movie Universe

The X-Men franchise is getting a facelift. After X-Men: Apocalypse landed with a thud, bringing in a ‘measly’ $80 million at the US box office, the future of the series is at a crossroads. Director Bryan Singer is keen to move onto new pastures – so who knows when we’ll be getting a new X-Men movie. As luck would have it, FX’s Legion – based on the story of Professor X’s troubled son David Haller – is entering production soon, and it plans to completely reimagine the superhero genre, which will involve separating itself from the cinematic universe.

Fargo‘s Noah Hawley is the creative force behind the series – which stars Dan Stevens in the title role – and he recently confirmed that his show won’t be bringing in any of the big-screen characters:

“Yeah, it’s none of the iconic characters from the movie franchise. I think that’s a strength on some level, because those characters come with rules. It’s hard. You don’t want to be handcuffed, when you’re trying to explore something. The power of making something unpredictable is really an important thing to preserve.”

He adds that this intriguing spinoff will exist as a “standalone kind of thing,” and that it plots to tell of a mutant-human world that’s unlike any we’ve seen in Fox’s silver screen outings. When asked if the mutants of Legion will be out to the public, here’s what he had to say:

“No… It’s a little more of a fable in my mind. If you were to say, “Where is it, and when is it?,” it’s not exactly clear, I think. And a lot of it is because [David’s] not exactly clear. It’s the world as perceived subjectively on some level. The recent X-Men movies, starting with First Class, are rooted in a time period and a world and playing with history in interesting ways. This isn’t doing that.”

Helping Hawley bring a new lease of life to the world of the mutants are Stevens, Aubrey Plaza, Katie Aselton, Rachel Keller and Jean Smart. Legion is gearing up to enter production this year, ahead of its 2017 release date. Until it bows, get acquainted with the series’ synopsis below:

Legion centers around David Haller (Stevens); 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.