‘Legion’ Executive Producer Lauren Shuler Donner Wanted to Make an X-Women Movie

The FOX/Disney merger is coming, and with it massive changes for the long-running X-Men franchise. Spanning 11 movies, with two more currently scheduled to be released this year, and two TV series (The Gifted on FOX, and the soon to end Legion on FX), Marvel’s mutant characters have been a big question mark when it comes to joining — or not — the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), home to characters like Captain America, Spider-Man, Black Panther and more. X-Men characters may be recast, upcoming movies scrapped (or not)… And stuck in the middle is longtime X-Men producer and franchise shepherd, Lauren Shuler Donner.

Donner isn’t officially out of the X-Men (at least until the merger goes through), but she is ready to hand the reins to MCU impresario Kevin Feige. And with that comes a handful of ideas that will most likely be scrapped. Sitting at the top of that list? A movie focusing on the X-Men’s female characters.

“I frankly wanted to see an X-Women movie,” Donner told Decider at theTelevision Critics Association’s 2019 winter tour. “I didn’t get it through. But I think that would be cool. I think — not to have no guys in it, you have to have guys in it — but to make instead of Charles and Magneto at the helm it’ll be whomever. Kitty Pryde and Illyana [Rasputin]. Something like that.”

Donner is happy to see female-driven superhero movies like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel emerge now. But the X-Men movies of the 2000s existed in a very different climate. “Years ago the thought at the studio was ‘You can’t have a female superhero,'” Donner said. “‘What about Tomb Raider?’ ‘Well that was different, that was Angelina Jolie.’ That’s what you’d get every single time.”

“It’s time [for female superhero movies] now, absolutely,” Donner added.

That said, it was initially a hairy, angry male mutant who drew Donner to the franchise that would go on to make billions at the box office.

“The first one I read was Logan. In order to have a successful movie you have to follow a character you want. Logan was such a compelling antihero: complex, an uncontrollable resurrection, somebody tampered with his body, unrequited love with Jean Grey, everything. There’s so much that made me want to see him on the screen and reading all the rest,” Donner said. “That’s why I like superhero movies, number one. Number two: The reason I love X-Men in particular is that there are so many badass women. There’s so many powerful superhero X-Women, and it is sort of evenly weighted. And that as a woman, obviously [that] drew me to it.”

But with all these team movies in the offing, Shuler Donner started to feel the X-Men needed to go in another direction.

“Subconsciously I realized that you can’t have these multiple superheroes all on the screen, story after story,” Donner explained. “Particularly with Charles [Xavier] and Magneto at the center because we’ve seen that, we’ve done that, we’ve done it many times. And I myself feel like somebody in the audience is gonna be like ‘Oh you know, this is just contrite’ which nobody wanted to do. The X-Men canon is ripe with multiple characters and everybody’s got a story and there’s so many stories. So why stick to the same story over and over again? We’ll get tired of making them, let alone the audience get tired of seeing them.”

It was while Donner was working on X2 — the second movie in the series — that she started reading the 1989-published comic, Wolverine Saga. She approached Hugh Jackman with the idea of making this four-issue collection its own set of spinoff movies, which would later become X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine, and Logan.

“Unfortunately the studio said, ‘You have to do an origin story first,’ and then we finally got to do that,” Donner said, referring to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

It was also on the set of X-Men Origins: Wolverine that Ryan Reynolds approached Donner about making his own Deadpool movie. The Deadpool who first appeared in Wolverine is a far cry from both the films that would follow — and the character’s source material. Wolverine‘s Deadpool featured a gray-suited mercenary who stole his powers from other mutants and whose mouth was sewn shut, not even close to the vulgar but strangely lovable assassin in the comics.

“As we were doing ADR on the first Wolverine, that was when Ryan Reynolds, cause we treated the character wrong, said ‘Let’s do my own character, my own Deadpool character. ‘Cause you saw that’s not how I’d do my own character,” Donner said. “So we pitched to the studio, and it took a long time to get it made. But then, that was what gave me the idea, we better just do something different out of the gate every single time.”

That quest to broaden the franchise led to her involvement in the trippiest superhero show currently on air, FX’s Legion. Created by Fargo‘s Noah Hawley, the series follows Professor X’s son, a man struggling with mental health issues who may also be the most powerful mutant in the world. And even in the complicated moral world of the X-Men, Legion is unquestionably dark. Season 2 notably ended with David (Dan Stevens) realizing that he had raped his girlfriend Syd (Rachel Keller) through a series of shocking psychic twists.

When asked if she was ever worried about how dark Hawley wanted to take the property, Donner said she had no reservations.”We had to fight to get Deadpool made. Deadpool as an R, really really fight. Some stories lend themselves that way. It is dark. You have a man with claws who stabs a girl in the first one. That’s dark shit,” Donner said. “You can pull it back a little bit and get it PG-13 but some stories, it’s OK to go for it. And certainly, [in] the streaming landscape, we do have a lot of dark stories.”

She also discussed what she likes most about moving into the world of televised superheroes. “[Legion] is much more character based than plot. The plot sometimes [gets] unclear, but the characters always remain compelling. That was one of the reasons I wanted to go to television was that I find television is character based. So I hope to carry that with me,” Donner said.

Donner may have some regrets about her time with the X-Men movie franchise, but she trusts her successor, President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige with the property. “He’s got all of his Marvel world, now he’s got the X-Men world. I trust Kevin to be very smart about it, and to weave them in judiciously, and not to flood the theaters with too many superhero movies,” Donner said.

The third and final season of Legion premieres on FX in June of 2019.

Where to stream Legion