All right, Fox! After a year of waiting for a big announcement about what kind of X-Men TV series the network would be choosing to move forward with, it looks like Fox decided to put at least part of its focus on the Hellfire Club for an upcoming project. There’s a laminated membership card coming your way if you guess that was where Fox would end up.
Here’s how Hellfire, which is currently a tentative title, will shape up. It’ll take place in the 1960s and will center on a young Special Agent who discovers that a very powerful woman with unexplainable abilities is actually a part of a big secret society of millionaires that have conspiratorial plans of taking over the world! (Is it just me, or are there no secret societies that are solely into cooperative sports or crocheting?) The group is called the Hellfire Club, and its members are as dangerous as they are influential.
20th Century Fox Television and Marvel Television are putting this thing together, and there’s an interesting group serving as the creative team. Beyond executive producers like Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg, Jeph Loeb and Lauren Shuler Donner, the potential series was created by the original and replaced Star Trek Beyond screenwriters Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, along with 24 writer/producers Evan Katz and Manny Coto. (The latter of which co-wrote that dreadful Dexter finale, by the way.) McKay and Payne will be penning the script.
The Hellfire Club first came into existence in 1980, and it has seen quite a few changes and improved development over the years, including how antagonistic they are to the X-Men themselves. Sometimes they’re cool, sometimes they’re not. The press release doesn’t directly mention the X-Men, so it’s not clear how much they would be involved in the show, although I imagine Fox would want to namecheck them as much as possible for promo’s sake.
You might recall the Hellfire Club was the main antagonist in X-Men: First Class, with Kevin Bacon as the leader Sebastian Shaw and January Jones as Emma Frost. This group also had Azrael, Riptide and Angel Salvadore among its members, although we doubt that any of these actors would be reprising their roles for the small screen, and it isn’t clear what characters the show would focus on. Considering how time travel factors heavily into the latest trilogy of X-Men movies, we’re also not sure if this TV project will tie into what we’ve already seen from them on-screen. These aren’t the most important of life’s mysteries, but we still want to know.
Fox has the DC/Vertigo adaptation Lucifer coming next year, and it shares very little in common with its source material, so who’s to say Hellfire will resemble its comic origins at all? In the meantime, we’re also looking forward to FX’s Legion pilot. Long live X-Men-related projects!
