The ‘X-Men’ TV Series: Will There Be A Connection To The Movies?
An X-Men TV series is officially being given the go-ahead and is set to raise a lot of questions. One of these questions concerns whether or not it will tie in with the film series which began back in 2000.
This isn’t the first time a live-action X-Men show aired. Generation X was launched in 1996, and it introduced a team of teenage mutants, including Jubilee (Heather McComb), Skin (Agustin Rodriguez), and Banshee (Jeremy Ratchford), alongside Emma Frost (Finola Hughs). It wasn’t well-received and possibly led to the decision to avoid bringing live-action Marvel Comics to the TV screen for over a decade.
That decision changed after Marvel successfully created a film franchise with the Avengers, and ABC‘s spin-off Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was released featuring the believed-deceased Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg). They then decided to expand on the hero base by slowly claiming the Defenders with individual series of their own. Daredevil was a smash hit, while Jessica Jones almost flew under the radar. Luke Cage brought a fresh new approach to the concept, and Iron Fist is set to be next.
With so many successful Marvel TV properties, 20th Century Fox decided to see if they can do the same with Legion. It isn’t based on Wes Bentley’s Blackheart, who referred to the Biblical character in Ghost Rider when he said, “We are legion, for we are many.” For one, Ghost Rider belongs to Marvel now, and he is a character on Agents of SHIELD, so 20th Century Fox can’t use him or any of his related characters.
Legion as an actual character is David Haller (Dan Stevens), a boy diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age. However, he is a mutant of many powers, each controlled by a host of different personalities, which is not the same thing. Schizophrenia is a disorder where the afflicted sees and hears things which aren’t real. What Legion has is dissociative identity disorder, and it makes him a bit of an anti-hero.
Coming from the same studio as X-Men, Legion is set to become part of the universe, as series creator Matt Nix confirmed. Cinema Blend quotes him as stating that it’s not particularly clear where Legion would fall in the universe’s increasingly confusing timeline.
“I guess I’d say that if you look at the movies, which take place from whatever, they started in 2000 to now … they don’t all line up perfectly. … I’m not slavishly fitting myself into a particular slot. [At] the same time, if you like that world, … there are definite nods to it. It definitely exists in the same general kind of universe, if that makes sense.”
The X-Men universe timeline is indeed confusing, with Origins: Wolverine being a prequel (and one of the worst, according to critics and fans alike), First Class being a soft reboot, and Days of Future Past taking place in two separate time periods. Also, don’t forget Deadpool, which stood as a self-aware reboot to the character Origins: Wolverine got so wrong.
The comic books have done the same, jumping all across time and even universes so often that nobody really ever dies.
We might see characters from the films make cameos, or hear verbal references to events from those films. The cameos often happen in Agents of SHIELD, such as Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Sif (Jaimie Alexander), and Luke Cage appeared in Jessica Jones before Luke got his own series. All across the Marvel TV universe, there are references to the Avengers films.
Basically, 20th Century Fox could be doing the same thing Marvel did when Legion becomes the next X-Men TV series on February 8.
[Featured Image by 20th Century Fox / FX]
