A brand new trailer for the long-awaited and long-delayed adaptation of The New Mutants is about to drop, and before that happens, I thought it would be a good idea to see how this one little movie ended up being shelved for over two years.
Here it is, a brief history of just what happened to The New Mutants.
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It’s been two long years since we first saw footage for The New Mutants. Seemingly based on “The Demon Bear Saga” storyline from the 1980s and looking like an out-an-out horror movie, The New Mutants seemed to be building on 20th Century Fox’s then push to move the X-Men in creative new directions. Legion (Noah Hawley’s fantastic television series) set out to explore mutant powers as a psychological horror, Logan gave us a study of mortality and redemption by way of a Western, and Deadpool was a meta-mockery of the franchise (and the whole genre), with a whole load of violence and cussing thrown in for good measure.
Needless to say, the prospect of what this movie could be was pretty interesting.
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Then It: Chapter One became the highest grossing horror movie of all time and a rumour started making the rounds that Fox wanted The New Mutants to be even scarier than it already was. This reportedly triggered extensive reshoots and delayed the movie’s release by a year, from April 13, 2018 to February 22, 2019, and then again to August 2, 2019.
God knows, multiple delays are never a good thing.
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Then Disney buys Fox. And given just how much control they assert over their Marvel properties, everyone figured that an out-of-continuity X-Men horror movie was likely never going to see the light of day. (Or at least be unceremoniously dumped in the darkest corners of Disney+.)
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In March 2019, in an interview with Rolling Stone, The New Mutants star Maisie Williams told Brian Hiatt that there were supposed to be reshoots, but that they never took place. She also confirmed that she had no clue as to what was actually going on with the movie.
“Who knows when the fuck that’s gonna come out,” she says. There were supposed to be reshoots to “make it scarier,” she explains, but they haven’t actually taken place.
Maisie Williams speaking to Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone
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The final nail in the coffin for The New Mutants came in June 2019, when X-Men: Dark Phoenix is released in cinemas and absolutely no one cared.
The next time anyone thought they’d see the X-Men, or any mutant for that matter, is once Kevin Feige had figured it all out.
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Surprise! On January 1st, director Josh Boone announces on Instagram that there was going to be a new trailer dropping on January 6th and that the movie would be out in cinemas on April 3rd.
Boone went on to confirm that the version of The New Mutants we were getting was, in fact, the version he originally intended to make.
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The New Mutants, directed by Josh Boone and starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, and Alice Braga, will be in cinemas on April 3rd.
For reals.
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