There’s a very simple reason why the Hellfire Club never made it to television with Fox: it would have been too expensive and complicated.
A few years ago, Fox became interested in expanding the X-Men film franchise into television, but the network needed to find the right properties first. This initiative would eventually produce the highly praised Legion on FX and the just-launched The Gifted at Fox. And, as longtime X-Men fans know, the Hellfire Club was another concept the network was looking into adapting, only for the project to quietly fall apart back in 2016.
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Now, in the wake of the debut of The Gifted on Monday night, X-Men film producer Lauren Shuler Donner told Entertainment Weekly why the project never got off the ground. In her simple worlds, “it was too many characters and not enough depth of character.” Few details on the prospective TV series are available, but it’s appears that Fox was scared away by the show’s inability to focus on anyone meaningfully.
Matt Nix’s pitch to The Gifted ultimately proved t be something the network was comfortable in moving forward with. While the series does boast a large cast of characters, the focus is based around a family unit, apparently negating the concerns Fox had over the previous Hellfire Club pitch.
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The Hellfire Club was originally created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne for the 1980 Uncanny X-Men #129. It is an organization of powerful Mutants who have come to blows with the X-Men. The most prominent iteration of the group included Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost, as seen in X-Men: First Class from 2011.
Airing Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Fox, The Gifted stars Stephen Moyer as Reed Strucker, Amy Acker as Caitlin Strucker, Sean Teale as Marcos Diaz/Eclipse, Coby Bell as Jace Turner, Emma Dumont cast as Lorna Dane/Polaris, Jamie Chung as Blink/Clarice Fong and Blair Redford as John Proudstar/Thunderbird, Natalie Alyn Lind as Lauren Strucker and Percy Hynes White as Andy Strucker.
Via LRMOnline