Simon Kinberg Thinks LEGION Could Be The "Breaking Bad Of Superhero Stories"
In a new interview, Simon Kinberg discusses the Legion TV series that's set up at FX with Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley on writing duties. In terms of doing something original and groundbreaking with this show, the producer compares it to none other than Breaking Bad...
We recently found out that two X-Men spin-off TV shows were in the works: Hellfire at Fox, and Legion at FX. Though neither show has been ordered to series just yet, producer Simon Kinberg assures Collider that they are both "super active", and seems very excited about Legion in particular.
With their Netflix projects Marvel has been able to go a lot darker and produce some very different content than we were used to seeing from them - so will it be the same for 20th Century Fox and these X-Men spin-offs? Kinberg says the FX partnership allows them to establish a different tone, and take things further than any of the movies - even the ultra-violent Deadpool - have been able to. He doesn't go into specifics, but he does name-drop one of the most popular, critically acclaimed shows of all time, Breaking Bad.
“I mean the thing that’s cool and that’s the hope in branching out to TV is that we can tell these X-Men stories in a slightly different way and even with a slightly different tone. It’s one of the thing we’re kind of doing in the different movie franchises. I mean Deadpool obviously has a very different, almost antithetical tone to the mainline X-Men movies. The X-Men movies are dramatic and almost operatic, whereas Deadpool is irreverent and hysterical and sort of a dirty R-rated comedy in many ways. So the TV shows give us an opportunity to go even further and certainly what I’m seeing on Legion with Noah and FX is an intent to do something completely original in the genre, in some ways to sort of blow up the paradigm of comic book or superhero stories and almost do our Breaking Bad of superhero stories.”
High hopes, but with a writer like Noah Hawley on board, who knows? Legion will tell the tale of David Haller, "a man diagnosed as a schizophrenic who has been in and out of hospitals his entire life until a strange encounter with a fellow patient confronts him with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might just be real." There's more on that and Hellfire at the link below.