Sometimes, a working title can tell you a lot about a project that the studio might not be ready to say yet, like when Spider-Man: Homecoming had the working title Coming Of Age Movie. The apparent working title for Fox’s new X-Men TV show isn’t quite that on the nose, but it still might tell us some information about what the series is going to cover. As reported by ComicBook.com, an entry recently popped up on Production Weekly (a database that keeps track of films and TV shows in development) that listed a pair of projects named X-Men: Supernova (or X-Men: Dark Phoenix or X-Men: Teen Spirit) and X-Men: Hellfire (or X-Men: Heaven).
ComicBook.com says the first group of names refer to Bryan Singer’s space-based X-Men movie—which makes sense, since that will most likely retell some portion of the comics’ iconic “Dark Phoenix Saga”—but the second group supposedly refers to Fox’s X-Men show. That means the working title is either Hellfire or Heaven, with the former referencing The Hellfire Club, a group of classic X-Men villains who last appeared in X-Men: First Class. Hellfire is also the name of the failed X-Men TV project that was in development alongside Noah Hawley’s Legion, so this could mean a couple of different things.
As ComicBook.com theorizes, it could just be a holdover from the old project, and the Hellfire name could have absolutely nothing to do with this new show—which, as we know, is about the parents of a mutant child running from the authorities—or it could be another take on whatever that show was going to be about. It’s not a huge stretch to say The Hellfire Club could be involved in his family’s story, but this is still very far from being an official announcement of any sort.