As reported by Deadline, Fox (the company) has ordered pilots for two shows based in the X-Men movie universe. Neither have “X-Men” in the name, though, so this will be nice and confusing for people who don’t obsessively keep up with nerdy crap like this. (So, not us and probably not you.) The first show is Legion, and it will be written and executive produced by Fargo creator Noah Hawley. The other is tentatively titled Hellfire, and it comes from a bunch of people who worked on 24 and the upcoming third Star Trek movie. Legion is going to FX, while Hellfire is going to Fox (the channel).
Legion will tell the story of a guy named David Haller who struggles with dissociative identity disorder, and Deadline’s synopsis says that he’ll be “confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real” after a “strange encounter with a fellow patient” at a psychiatric hospital. What Deadline doesn’t say, though, is that the comic book version of David Haller happens to be the son of Charles Xavier, and he has a ton of superpowers that are controlled by his alternate personalities. The fact that those things got left out means the Legion show will either be ignoring some of the less-grounded aspects of the character (plus we can’t imagine Patrick Stewart showing up on TV as Professor X any time soon), or it was all supposed to be a surprise and we just ruined it.
Hellfire, as indicated by the name, will tell the story of the infamous Hellfire Club, a secret society of fancy folk who get together so they can put on weird outfits and talk about how to further their evil plans. The club is especially concerned with mutants, which is where The X-Men get involved. This TV series will be set in the ’60s, though, and it will reportedly follow “a young Special Agent who learns that a power-hungry woman with extraordinary abilities” is working with The Hellfire Club to try and take over the world. We’re not sure how this will connect to X-Men: First Class, but that movie was also set in the ’60s and not only featured The Hellfire Club, but also a power-hungry woman with extraordinary abilities who was trying to help a guy from The Hellfire Club take over the world, so it might be important.
Both Legion and Hellfire are still just pilots, so we’ll probably be hearing a lot more about them as they get into casting and all of that.