X-Men Writer/ Producer Simon Kinberg speaks on “Gambit” and FX’s “Hellfire [Club]” and “Legion”

X-Men writer/producer Simon Kinberg spoke to Collider unleashing details of his involvement in the coming FX / Marvel projects stemming from the X-Men universe i.e. Hellfire and Legion.

In his divulging he compared Legion to the calibre of Breaking Bad, which is a tall order:

Legion and Hellfire are both super active. Hellfire we’re hoping to be shooting at the beginning of next year, the pilot. It’s been extraordinary working with Noah Hawley [on Legion]…the production’s ramping up to start shooting at the beginning of the year with FX.

I mean the thing that’s cool and that’s the hope in branching out to TV is that we can tell these X-Men stories in a slightly different way and even with a slightly different tone. It’s one of the thing we’re kind of doing in the different movie franchises. I mean Deadpool obviously has a very different, almost antithetical tone to the mainline X-Men movies. The X-Men movies are dramatic and almost operatic, whereas Deadpool is irreverent and hysterical and sort of a dirty R-rated comedy in many ways. And Gambit will have its own different flavour and tone to it, will be more of like a heist movie and a sexy thriller in a way. So the TV shows give us an opportunity to go even further and certainly what I’m seeing on Legion with Noah and FX is an intent to do something completely original in the genre, in some ways to sort of blow up the paradigm of comic book or superhero stories and almost do our Breaking Bad of superhero stories.

The Hellfire script we have an amazing writing team, really two writing teams working together on it, and also that will shoot next year.

So as you would expect Fox is going full ham to try and capitalise on their hefty-small slice of comic franchise heaven entering the TV arena alongside Marvel. But to be fair, Fox seems to still be tinkering with a formula they haven’t fully mastered yet, so anxiety for fans is a little higher than it should be. But in any case it is too early to tell whether Fox’s plans are well conceived or a rush to capitalise on it’s slice of the Marvel franchise.