FX's "Legion" To Be Completely Different...Like Deadpool

One of the biggest surprise break-out movies of the year so far has been Deadpool...well, at least it's a surprise for people who aren't familiar with the comic book character, or the writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.  Movie studios have been quick to try and duplicate the success that it's had, but they haven't had much luck in doing it.  So instead of trying to copy it's formula for a movie, maybe they should think smaller?


FX Productions and Marvel Televisions are co-producing a television show called Legion, which will be an 8-episode series that will be premiering sometime in 2017.  The idea came from Noah Hawley (Fargo) and the team that brought us the X-Men movies - Laura Shuler Donner, Bryan Singer, and Simon Kinberg.  It will follow a group of mutants that will star Dan Stevens as David Haller, Charles Xavier's schizophrenic son, as well as Rachel Keller (Fargo), Jean Smart (Fargo), Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), Jeremie Harris (A Walk Among The Tombstones), Amber Midthunder (Hell or High Water), Katie Aselton (The League), and Bill Irwin (Interstellar).


Producer Simon Kinberg recently sat down with MovieFone to talk about the upcoming television series.  Here's what he had to say:

“The success of [Deadpool] showed the studio that not just the mainline X-Men movies, but there are characters -- and characters with different tones and different vibes, that can justify their own movies as well. So Gambit, and Deadpool, and New Mutants, and even others ... we're really serious about making, and then, like the way Marvel has done so brilliantly, the Marvel Studios have done so brilliantly, feeding them in and out of each other's stories. Building these larger tapestries that you can watch one movie and enjoy it, and that can be your only experience of an X-Men movie, but if you watch all of them together, you get a deeper, richer experience.

Tonally, [Legion is] very different. Noah is a genius -- he wrote and created and directed the pilot to Legion -- and it is a very different sensibility than anything we've done with the X-Men movies. Almost, I would say, as radically different as Deadpool was from the mainline X-Men movies. Legion is, again, in a different direction: really character-based, really granular in terms of getting inside the details of the characters. It stands as part of the X-Men universe, but it stands apart from it as well.”

So what do you think about this new television series?  Does this sound like something that you'd want to watch?  FX has been doing a pretty good job with their original programming, so I have to say that I'm kind of looking forward to this one.  Let me know your thoughts in the comments section down below.