Yesterday’s discussion of the new live-action tv series in the works at ABC made me rethink my idea to have this series ‘air’ on FOX. I’ve decided that my first instinct was correct, FOX is the most likely network station to pick up X-Men as a live action tv series (should the universe align to make it so).
The reason being is that we already know 20th Century Fox owns the rights for X-Men which is why they produce and distribute the movies and not Marvel Studios. This extends to television as Fox sued Marvel over Mutant X which was basically X-Men with a ‘government experimentation background’ ala Dark Angel which came out a year earlier. (Come to think of it, Max pretty much becomes a Rogue analogue but that’s another discussion).
Whedon’s show will be on ABC because ABC is owned by Disney and Disney owns Marvel Entertainment and in turn has distribution rights with Marvel for anything Marvel still has licensing rights to. But if Marvel wanted to create a live action X-Men series they would have to either get the rights back from Fox or make a deal with them.
With two more X-Men movies on the horizon, the rights aren’t going to revert any time soon. Also, Fox is not one to give up licensing lightly, the whole business with Daredevil not withstanding. If they even consider letting Marvel buy out the licensing agreement it probably won’t be worth it to Marvel to pay their price tag. But then, who knows.
So the final option left for Marvel is to make a deal with Fox to co-produce an X-Men series. Marvel Entertainment was involved in the production of X-Men: First Class so there is at least a working relationship there. Fox would obviously want it to be on one of their channels, so either FOX network or FX. Considering that X-Men would be more a mainstream and young adult friendly show their best bet is to put it on a network channel.
Now, this assumes that Marvel is involved with the tv series because since Fox has the licensing for X-Men they could go ahead with a tv show without Marvel’s input. Again, either FOX network or FX, network being the most viable choice.
So, here is the million dollar question: What is the likelihood of an actual X-Men live action tv-series?
Fox always has been more friendly to scifi and fantasy tv shows than other channels (not counting CW’s lineup of young adult emo fests). They know that Heroes was popular and Alphas is currently a hit… despite the fact that Alphas is Heroes without their budget and Heroes was Mutant X with a bigger budget and Mutant X was X-Men without the licensing… and where was I? Oh, yes, the audience is out there as long as they make good content which is accessible not only to fans but to newcomers as well.
Fox is still interested in the X-Men franchise with two movies on the way, so developing it further into a tv series is not a big stretch, esp since this new S.H.I.E.L.D. series is direct competition.
That being said, I think it’s unlikely at this point that Fox is even considering an X-Men tv series. With the movies coming out they’ll probably want to focus on the film franchise. If Days of Future Past and Wolverine do well then they’ll want to continue to work that way. If they don’t do well, then they probably won’t want to tie too much into an fx heavy, possibly costly, tv show like X-Men would be (though in my fan fic I attempt to take this into account and keep the fx budget down).
Maybe in ten years once the new set of movies have done their run, Marvel’s tv show and Phase Two and possible Phase Three have also ended, then Fox might look into developing a series.
Until then… well, that’s why we have fan fic.
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X-Men: The (fan fic) Series 