Fox Launches 2 X-Men TV Shows

Edited by Robert Beach

After months of hearing nothing from either camp, it seems some agreement has been reached between Marvel and Fox to allow Fox to make X-Men TV shows…kind of.  Rather than making a TV Show out of anyone attending Xavier’s school or its sundry collection of graduates, these new shows will focus on some of the quasi-villains and supporting characters of the X-Men mythos. 

The two announced shows coming soon to TV are Hellfire, a show about the eponymous Hellfire Club last seen in X-Men: First Class, and Legion, revolving around the mentally unstable yet extremely powerful son of Charles Xavier. One thing is for sure: this is a major milestone in the Fox/Marvel beef that has everyone speculating, especially in the wake of early rumors that Fox had deferred the Fantastic Four rights back to Marvel. 

X-Rated X-Men 

The most notable thing about these announcements is both of these shows seem to revolve around villains, or at least characters who have menaced the world in some capacity. The Hellfire Club have been serious antagonists on multiple occasions in the comics. First breaking onto the X-Men scene during the Phoenix Saga when the mutant Mastermind used his illusion powers to let Jean Grey embrace her kinky side. That’s not an exaggeration either. The original X-Men Kirby and Lee started in the Silver Age was more or less just basic superhero adventures that happened to star teen heroes. 

Chris Claremont’s revision of the X-Men in 1974 really embraced the idea of the team as young people full of hormones and plenty of sex. Seriously, if you read the classic stuff the X-Men are always getting entangled in complex interpersonal relationships like the background plot about Storm trying to seduce Kitty Pride. So when Claremont decided to have Jean get possessed by an alien fire bird from the dawn of creation, he ended up using it as a metaphor for Jean Grey delving into her more sexually repressed and kinky fetishes. That’s part of why so many of the women in the Hellfire club like Emma Frost wear literal dominatrix gear.

Hellfire's Place on TV

I’m not sure how much of the sexy power club nature of the Hellfire Club will make it on screen, but it’d be a shame if it was cut out entirely. Without the underlying metaphor of clashing styles between Xavier’s stringently repressive rules and boundaries versus the Club’s hedonistic freedom and anarchy, there’s really not much to the Hellfire Club. We’ve heard plenty of times in the X-Men comics that the club is some vastly powerful and eldritch secret society, yet we rarely see them exert that power in any meaningful way. 

What strikes me as the most likely course of action will be the new show will revolve around the Hellions, a group of wayward mutant teens adopted by the Hellfire Club as a sort of evil X-Men team.  They mainly work as a strike force for the club, and the team dynamic is close enough to the X-Men that you could make it work as a kind of morally bankrupt, team-based, action-oriented cable super show. It’d also allow the creators to slot Emma Frost into the proceedings. It strikes me as a must; she’s the most popular Hellfire Club member. 

Origins of Legion 

Legion is less of your bog standard villain, though he’s still not quite a good guy. He’s the son of Xavier with the ability to warp and manipulate reality in conceivably limitless ways. Like most reality-warping Marvel characters, this amazing power has more or less driven him insane. The whole “unhinged superhero” is a neat concept that’s been explored maybe a handful of times. While Legion isn’t the best version of the concept, he’s an enjoyable one at the very least. 

He had his own comic awhile back as part of the Marvel NOW branding initiative that was one of the few highlights of X-Men comics at the time. His most significant contribution to the comics was when he used his powers to kill his father back in time and thus started the ‘90s maxi-event Age of Apocalypse, one of Marvel’s most successful alternate universe stories. Speaking of which, the importance of Xavier to Legion’s identity and stories gives me the biggest pause on this show. 

Emma Frost really wasn’t much of a key figure in X-Men: First Class, making her an easy re-cast, and James McAvoy has pretty solidly established himself as Professor Xavier. I don’t see him signing up for a Fox TV show of some kind given how much his film career is picking up, so they’d need to essentially write around Professor Xavier in the show. There’s still room for an interesting Legion show without Professor X, maybe one on the generally unexplored portion of the X-Men universe of McTagget Island.  Even so, it’d be a much harder sell than simply doing a Cable or New Mutants show or even a Morlocks-based series.

 

Speculation over the Deal

Finally, there’s the lingering question of how this happened. Fox and Marvel have been at war for the better part of a decade now, and we’ve received no official comments to the contrary making this announcement seriously suspicious. Marvel has always maintained right of veto over the X-Men TV license, so Fox more or less had to throw them a bone to get the okay for these shows. That is unless Fox put together some form of legal flim-flam to cut Marvel out of the loop entirely. That option seems the most unlikely as if it was the case Marvel would probably already be gearing up for a big, public, Disney-funded legal battle over Fox trying to make shows without their say so. 

What I think is most likely happened is Fox probably sold the Fantastic Four rights back to Marvel or some derivation of that sale. Maybe it’s the whole package; maybe it’s just Galactus and Silver Surfer. Whatever it is, it’s starting to look way more likely that one of Marvel’s mystery 2020 films is a Fantastic Four reboot to help define the company's floundering Phase 4. 

Marvel actually tried to snap up the Galactus rights a few years back when Fox was about to lapse on the Daredevil rights; however, rather than trade the Galactus rights back, Fox just let the Daredevil rights lapse. A move that I’m betting they’ve come to regret after the mass success of the Daredevil Netflix show and the abject failure of Josh Trank’s Fant4stic. That film marked the 4^th fantastic failure from Fox making it dubious they’d hold out for a fifth chance to lose money on this franchise. 


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