And what team will it have?
X-Men has, for the past 15 years, been a film franchise. With names like Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen attached, how could it not be a big screen affair? But what many people have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) is that the first on screen iteration of mutants was on a little TV movie called Generation X from 1996. An adaptation of the team of the same name, it was pretty god awful and everyone thought that would be the end of X-Men on live action TV.
However, it seems that rumblings have risen up of a long running live action show that would air on Fox.
Who’s writing the show?
It seems writing duo Patrick McKay and John D. Payne, who you may remember were the writers on the Roberto Orci version of Star Trek Beyond, are writing the pilot. Evan Katz and Manny Coto will apparently serve as showrunners. You may also remember Manny Coto as the showrunner for the last season of Star Trek: Enterprise, which was actually a very solid season of TV.
So, three Star Trek writers are on this thing?
In a sense, yes.
Is that a good thing?
I guess we’ll see.
How likely is this to happen?
Apparently, Marvel still needs to sign off as FOX supposedly only has the feature rights. This may get a little messy, as FOX and Marvel are not on the best terms. Marvel may ask for something in return.
If it does happen, what will the series be about?
We don’t know for certain, but there are a few routes it can take. The first is to follow one of the lesser known teams such as X-Force or X-Factor and set it in the current movie universe ala Agents of Shield. This has the benefit of drawing on already established canon but it also means it’ll be difficult to have crossovers without buckets of money.
The second possibility is to have a separate TV continuity for Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters. We could follow kids in the school as they take classes, interact with teachers (who are also the X-Men), and deal with the bigotry from the world outside. The benefits to this approach are that the show can do whatever it wants and retell all the stories from existing X-Men lore… but it won’t be connected to any of the films that came before it.
Which is the most likely option?
We’re inclined to say the first, as FOX will want to protect their X-Men films with brand cohesion. They’ll also probably do it to have some interconnected stories in order to steal a page from Marvel’s playbook. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if the show existed in a separate continuity all together.
