Last fall, reports surfaced about 20th Century Fox‘s future big-screen plans with their various Marvel properties, but it was said that one name long associated with the X-Men brand would be moving on: Bryan Singer. But perhaps unable to fully pull himself away from tales about mutants, Singer is staying involved, this time on the small screen.
The Wrap reports that the director will helm the first episode of Matt Nix‘s brewing, untitled series on Fox TV, which just landed a pilot order. While it’s commonly referred to as an X-Men series, the plot follows two parents who discover their children are mutants. In order to escape the government and survive, the family joins an underground network of mutant fugitives. And while I figured Fox might keep the movie and TV worlds separate, according to Nix, they will connect, which perhaps explains Singer’s involvement.
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“Without getting into specifics that I’ll get murdered for, I would say that a fan of the movies — particularly the movies but also the comic books — would not be disoriented as to where this fits in the mythology. If you look at the movies that take place, they don’t all line up perfectly. So it’s not like I’m slavishly fitting myself into a particular slot [but] if you like that world and the world of the movies, there are definite nods to it, it definitely exists in the same general universe,” Nix said this month at the Television Critics Association (via Comic Book).
“Without getting into specifics, it’s sort of designed to side-step questions like ‘Where is Wolverine?’ So you sort of have to answer those questions, and I didn’t want to do anything like ‘Wolverine is just offscreen!’ You know what I mean. So it exists in a world where those questions are answered without needing to name a lot of names or spend time dwelling on that issue. So within that, there are a certain amount of those characters I can use, and I’m using some of those, but others I’m inventing. But everything is invented with a nod towards the existing mythology,” he continued. “When I was pitching the show, I pitched some characters that appear nowhere in the mythology, but the guys from Marvel, when I started describing them, all gave each other knowing nods. It was like ‘Oh I see what he’s doing, yes.’ So I tried to do a lot of that. I didn’t want to get into the realm of too much ‘Yep! New X-Men here we go!’ because with this there’s a little bit of fan service.”
It’ll be interesting to see just how much of a link is made between the TV show and movies given how twisty the cinematic narrative has become, but I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. No series order has been given yet, but barring some kind of disaster, I’d imagine it’ll happen.