Fox Officially Orders ‘X-Men’ TV Pilot We All Thought Was Already Ordered
Imma…Imma fucking level with you. I thought Fox had already ordered an X-Men TV pilot.
The pilot will focus on 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.
This is the second Marvel TV project to go to a network in the Fox family, with “Legion” — a co-production between Marvel TV and FX Productions — set to debut on FX on Feb. 8. If picked up to series, the new project would be the second X-Men-based show to make it to television. Fox and FX parent 21st Century Fox enjoys exclusive film and television rights to the X-Men characters under a longstanding licensing deal with Marvel.
The Fox project is expected to tie more closely than “Legion” to the X-Men mythos as laid out in the comic books and feature films. “With the X-Men comics, there are a lot of alt universes, so that has allowed me some leeway,” Noah Hawley, creator of “Legion,” told Variety in the cover story from this week’s issue. “And obviously it’s a sort of origin story for David, but none of the other characters that I’ve surrounded him with are from the comics. It’s sort of an invented world.”
Lauren Shuler Donner, Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg, Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory are also on board to executive produce the Fox pilot. Fox is already in business with Nix, who currently serves as showrunner on the soon-to-premiere “APB,” about a billionaire who takes over a Chicago police precinct.