X-Men TV Show Gets Title, First Read, New Details

FOX’s new X-Men spin off TV show gets a title, pictures from the first table read plus details that suggests it could tie back to the world of Logan.

The MCU and the DCEU have been slugging it out recently for supremacy at the box office (Marvel is ahead by orders of magnitude) and on the small screen (DC is winning handily, at least on network TV). But over at 20th Century FOX, the first studio to bring us hit superhero movies in the form of 1999’s X-Men, they have been slow to adapt to the world that rapidly shifted under their feet.

While Arrow and the like are already five seasons in and Agents of SHIELD is on season 4, FOX is only now getting their first TV shows based on the X-Men comic series off the ground, with the premiere of Legion last month. Part of the problem seemed to be FOX finding their voice–since they are also Marvel comics based, they had to find a way to differentiate their universe from the MCU one. The solution came only last year with Deadpool‘s monster box office haul, leading to the new Logan that saw record breaking numbers for an R rated film.

In the wake of Logan‘s fortunes, FOX has started releasing details of their second X-Men TV show, which they’ve mostly kept mum on. And it seems like this might have been deliberate–like the MCU, the TV show details sound like they might be set in a world that is directly affected by the events in the movie verse. (DC stubbornly keeps their TV-verse and their film-verse separate, which, considering how badly the movies have been received, is probably in their TV side’s best interest.)

On Friday, FOX released the first images from the upcoming show’s table read, along with the working title for the series.

But it was the plot details that followed that caught everyone’ immediate attention. According to Entertainment Weekly:

"The pilot centers on Kate (Acker) and Reed Stewart (Moyer), two ordinary parents who discover their children have abilities. Forced to go on the run from the government, they team up with an underground network of mutants, led by Sam (Redford). Chung will portray the teleporting mutant Blink, while Dumont plays Polaris, the mistress of magnetism and the daughter of Magneto."

An “underground network of mutants”? Doesn’t that sound suspiciously like the vaguely underground railroad type network that X-23’s caretaker was working to help get her charges out of the lab before they were terminated for being “defective”? Moreover, there’s an entire communications network being conveyed through the use of X-Men comics that’s also a (very meta) movie subplot. Is this that same thing?

Marvel’s tie in to Agent’s of SHIELD hobbled its first season, as the show struggled to wait for the moviehouse big reveal in Captain America: Winter Soldier. Since then the show has pulled farther and farther from the movies, especially in the wake of direct Joss Whedon refusing to play ball and acknowledge the show in the second Avengers movie. But the concept of small to big screen and back was a solid one, and with the groundwork laid out in the movie that comes *prior* to the show’s debut, FOX might be able to trump the MCU once again with its own characters.

Next: 20 Of Our Favorite X-Men Characters

Gifted (or whatever it will end up being titled) is still in the pilot order stages. We hope to hear news of a full pick up this summer.