Details on Fox + Marvel’s coming Legion TV series revealed

With the big news coming from the Marvel and Fox camp of TV shows hailing from the Marvel’s X-Men Universe in the form of Legion and Hellfire, it seems a lot of positivity has been stirring up between the two entertainment jugganauts.

Now show runner for Legion, Noah Hawley, imparted some knowledge on the TV show, particularly addressing why the TV show is somewhat far removed from the X-Men, as there is no mention of the X-Men, of Legion’s father, Professor X, or even of mutants:

It’s interesting; I do think that the show needs to stand on its own two feet. The people who care that it’s an X-Men title are going to know it’s an X-Men title. You’re looking for the largest possible and most diverse audience, so that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the show itself.

Hawley goes futher to explain that the intended show is to be able to exist on its own:

[The Legion TV series is] conceived more as a standalone. I don’t want to say too much more about it on that level, but certainly it’s not constructed as a back-door anything. It’s more just that there’s a story that I want to explore that has to fit into that larger universe, which is exciting.

Hawley revealed in the interview with the TV Insider that Marvel owns the rights to X-Men’s TV license, and Fox has been communicating with Marvel over the coming X-Men TV shows for a hot minute:

It’s been in the works for a long time. Some of that was Marvel dealmaking process. Fox has rights to make movies and sort of tacitly the rights to do TV, but they’ve never done it before so they had to work out all the details.

FX Productions is the lead studio. My relationship is with FX primarily, and I’m just getting to know Jeph Loeb and the people at Marvel, and I think it’s going to be collaboration in the best sense.

So why bring Legion to the TV screen? Hawley offers up character complexity as a driving motivator for the TV show:

What I really like about him is, here’s a character who is schizophrenic on some level, a character struggling with mental illness. Is he crazy or does he have these powers? The answer is, kind of both. I’m a big believer that the structure of a story should reflect the content of the story. And so I liked the idea that if you have a character that doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not real, that is also the audience’s journey.

Filming for Legion TV series begins next year in late January / early February.