Since it had been announced that Fox was developing live-action television programming featuring the X-Men, True Believers wondered if there would be any connection between ‘Legion‘ or any other upcoming projects and the iconic films. Back in January, FX president John Landgraf set the record straight when he said that the FX series from ‘Fargo’ creator Noah Hawley would take place in “parallel universe in which the U.S. Government is in the early days of being aware that something called mutants exist, but the public does not”. However, it seems like things have changed in the past seven months because a major player in Fox’s Marvel mutant movies has stated the contrary.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bryan Singer revealed at the Edinburgh Television Festival that ‘Legion’ and another planned X-Men series “will relate to future X-Men movies”. The filmmaker behind ‘X-Men’, ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’, and ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ expanded even further as he shared that the X-Men shows that he is executive producing have been designed as “part of the X-Men universe, but when you watched it, you wouldn’t have to label it, it could exist completely on its own.”
The continuity of the X-Men films was a pretty jumbled mess until ‘Days of Future Past’. While there are still some major questions that have yet to be answered, things seems to be back on track and headed in a good direction (especially since ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ is no longer canon). However, if ‘Legion’ truly does take place in a world where the public is unaware of mutants, then there’s no way that the show could exist in the same timeline as films at this point since the public became aware in the 70s. Assuming that the tale of Dan Stevens’ David Haller takes place in the present day, it’s hard to believe that it would even exist in the former timeline since mutants were introduced to the world in the early 2000s. Unless big changes were made to the series since the beginning of the year, as much as I’d love to see James McAvoy or Patrick Stewart make an appearance as Charles Xavier (who is Haller’s father in the comics), I don’t see Singer’s comments holding up.
But then again, Singer is definitely privy to information that we don’t have access to, so who really knows? I guess we’ll just have to tune in whenever ‘Legion’ premieres. Until then, share your thoughts and theories on this matter in the comments below.
‘Legion’ starring Dan Stevens, Rachel Keller, Jean Smart, Aubrey Plaza, Jeremie Harris, Amber Midthunder, Katie Aselton, and Bill Irwin debuts on FX in early 2017.
Despite being a “professional writer”, Ben likes run-on sentences far too much. For more of his attempts at being funny and the occasional insightful thought, follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
