The League’s Katie Aselton joins X-Men spinoff series Legion

By Rick Marshall Published March 2, 2016

The cast of the upcoming X-Men spinoff series Legion is getting larger every week, and the latest addition to the FX series hails from one of the FOX network’s recent hits, The League.

Actress Katie Aselton, who played Jenny MacArthur on the raunchy sitcom, has reportedly been cast as one of the supporting characters in Legion, and will play the older sister of the series’ protagonist, David Haller. Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens will play Haller in the series.

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According to EW, Aselton’s character is named “Amy,” and is described as someone who “does her best to remain positive, which proves difficult when her brother has spent years in and out of hospitals after being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.”

In the Marvel Comics universe, David Haller is the son of the telepathic leader of the X-Men, Charles Xavier. Although David inherits a mutant ability akin to that of his father, he’s unable to control his power and has frequently found himself at odds with the X-Men as his abilities threaten to destabilize the world around him.

The pilot episode of Legion will be written and directed by Fargo series creator Noah Hawley, who will also serve as an executive producer on the show. Hawley has indicated that the series isn’t likely to connect with the X-Men movie universe, despite the comic-book inspiration for the series and its links to characters in the X-Men universe.

Along with Stevens, Aselton joins a cast that already includes Parks and Recreation actress Aubrey Plaza as an optimistic friend of David, Designing Women actress Jean Smart as David’s therapist, Fargo actress Rachel Keller as a character named “Syd,” and unidentified characters played by Jeremie Harris (A Walk Among the Tombstones) and Amber Midthunder (Sunshine Cleaning).

The series is being produced by FX and Marvel Television, and involves many of the franchise producers of the X-Men movie-verse.

Legion is expected to begin filming soon.

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Is X-Men Origins: Wolverine really that bad?

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

In 2009, 20th Century Fox attempted to expand the X-Men movies with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first film in a trilogy to feature Hugh Jackman as the title character. While the film eventually got its sequels, it's also regarded as one of the worst X-Men movies. This one may have been snake-bitten from the start. Shortly before it was released, the movie was leaked online. While X-Men Origins: Wolverine opened to $85 million domestically, its repeat business was strained at best and it limped to a $373.1 million worldwide total.

Since the origins of Deadpool & Wolverine are closely linked to this film, it's time to ask if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is really as bad as it appeared to be? There have certainly been worse superhero movies than this one -- The Flash, Morbius, and Madame Web all come to mind -- but is that enough to redeem X-Men Origins: Wolverine and salvage its reputation? First, let's look at the things that work in this movie.
Hugh Jackman brings his A-game as Wolverine

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Deadpool & Wolverine: Here’s how the X-Men can be introduced into the MCU

Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) uses his telepathy in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

When the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched in 2008, the fledgling Marvel Studios was forced to get by without some of their own most ubiquitous characters. Marvel had escaped bankruptcy in the 1990s by selling off the movie rights to their hottest comics libraries, such as Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. Against all odds, this didn’t stop Marvel Studios into becoming a box office juggernaut that turned B- and C-list superheroes like Iron Man and Rocket Raccoon into cultural phenomena. However, with the Marvel empire now in decline, the MCU desperately needs an injection of new characters to recapture audience attention. And as fate (by which we mean, the iron hand and bottomless pockets of Disney) would have it, nearly all of the characters that Marvel auctioned off decades ago are now back in play -- namely, the X-Men.
The addition of familiar favorites like Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, and Deadpool into the MCU has been inevitable ever since Disney purchased X-Men rights holders 20th Century Fox in 2019, but Marvel has taken its time in reintroducing these absent characters into the sprawling franchise. There have been some teases throughout the ongoing Multiverse Saga, but so far, no notable X-Men characters have debuted in the core continuity of the MCU (referred to as Earth-616 in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but as Earth-199999 in most other places).
That may all change after Deadpool & Wolverine, a film that serves as a bridge between the now-defunct 20th Century Fox X-Men film franchise and Disney/Marvel’s MCU. Here, Ryan Reynolds reprises his role as the wisecracking, fourth-wall-smashing Deadpool, whose films take place in a continuity adjacent to the mainline Fox X-Men series, while Hugh Jackman returns to portray a version of Wolverine from a timeline we’ve never seen before. It’s a multiverse-hopping adventure involving the Time Variance Authority from the MCU series Loki, and will certainly have implications on how and in what form the X-Men will arrive in Marvel’s main movie timeline.
We’ve got a few ideas regarding how the X-Men’s MCU debut might play out, based on hints from Deadpool & Wolverine’s trailers, existing films, and context from the comic book source material.

Multiversal mashup
A key difficulty with adding the X-Men to the existing MCU is explaining their absence from the story so far. It’s one thing to hand-wave the Eternals skipping the final battle against Thanos, but it would be a much harder sell if a future MCU installment were to reveal that Charles Xavier’s benevolent Mutant superheroes and/or Magneto’s more radical Brotherhood have been operating in secret all along but somehow never crossed paths with the Avengers. Further, the idea that Mutants have been around for generations is central to a lot of X-Men mythology, and certain characters (namely, Magneto) have firm ties to specific historical events and can’t easily be transplanted into the present day without accounting for their whereabouts in the meantime.
However, throughout the Multiverse Saga -- which began production after Disney bought out Fox -- characters from the core Marvel Cinematic Universe have found themselves in alternate realities that resemble their own but also include X-Men characters. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the MCU’s Strange visits an Earth that is watched over by the Illuminati, a council that includes familiar faces such as Peggy Carter, Professor X, portrayed by a returning Sir Patrick Stewart, and “Mr. Fantastic” Reed Richards, a character who was also reacquired by Disney during the Fox deal.
The Marvels (2023) | Post Credits Scene
In the post-credits scene to The Marvels, Monica Rambeau crosses over into a universe that is home to a superpowered version of her mother, but also Dr. Hank “Beast” McCoy. The setting of Deadpool & Wolverine, which is presumably the home universe of the latter character, features several returning Fox X-Men cast members reprising their roles as well as alternate versions of MCU characters like Ant-Man, and possibly Doctor Strange (or some other sling-ring user).
The implication here seems to be that the multiverse is full of Earths on which the Avengers, the X-Men, and other characters to which Marvel Studios previously couldn’t use have all co-existed from the beginning, more or less the way they have in the comics. This would make the core MCU -- as well as the Avengers-less Fox X-Men universes -- something of an aberration.
Presently, the Multiverse Saga is slated to conclude in 2027 with Avengers: Secret Wars, a film that shares the name of a 2015 comics event in which the Marvel Comics multiverse was collapsed and reformed. If the film centers around a similar disaster, this could be an ideal opportunity to mash the MCU’s Earth with another in which the X-Men have always been around -- not the X-Men from Deadpool or the X-Men movie continuity, but different versions of the characters who could be as similar or different from the ones fans already know and love. Future MCU installments would be free to revisit or reimagine popular storylines in this new context, or to accept the broad strokes of the films that already exist and then move forward.

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Marvel believes Daredevil: Born Again will be as loved as X-Men ’97

Daredevil stands on top of a building and stares.

Matt Murdock will have his hands full protecting the people of New York City in the upcoming Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again.

Charlie Cox returns as Murdock/Daredevil, the role he originated for three seasons on Netflix's Daredevil. While the spirit of the blind crimefighter will remain the same, Daredevil enters an entirely new universe full of new challenges in Born Again. Marvel Studios' Head of Streaming, Television and Animation Brad Winderbaum compared Cox's return as Daredevil to another revived show, X-Men '97.