The New Mutants director, Josh Boone, in a recent interview with EW, went on record to confirm that his upcoming film never went through any re-shoots despite the mountain of rumors. This revelation is just another step on the long road of actually seeing this movie air. The New Mutants has gathered a reputation for itself as the little movie that could, once thought never to see the light of day, now the movie is one month away from release.
The saga of The New Mutants starts back in 2017 after Josh Boone and Knate Lee pitched the movie to Fox, the duo started filming between July to September 2017. The idea was to show a more mature horror take on the X-men franchise, with the premise of having a group of teenagers realizing that they have powers. Inspired by the New Mutant comic of the same name, the idea was greenlight following the success of Deadpool and Logan. The New Mutant was first slated to release in April 2018.
The movie quickly went through some trouble with rumors coming out that Fox wanted reshoots because the movie wasn’t scary enough. This rumor was finally shut down by Boone as he said in a phone interview, “Everybody said we did reshoots! We’ve never done reshoots,” he tells EW over the phone in late February. “And I’ll tell you this: if there hadn’t been a merger, I’m sure we would’ve done reshoots the same way every movie does pickups. We didn’t even do that because by the time the merger was done and everything was settled, everybody’s older.” With rumors of reshoots finally coming to a close, the real question now is, why did it take so long for the film to come out? The most accepted answer seems to be the Disney merger. The New Mutants finished filming by September 2017, news of the merger was announce December of the same year, leaving everyone confused. “We had heard nothing because of the merger,” Boone adds. “It was radio silence for about a year where we had no new information at all.”
After the merger was announced, the only X-men related films that premiered were X-Men: Dark Phoenix, and Deadpool 2. Both movies were sequels or successful franchises. The New Mutants is a spin-off with nothing to go on other than a strong cast, with a fantastic trailer. The movie quickly went silent, and no news came for almost a year.
After the merger, Disney announced Disney+ a streaming service promising the most extensive Disney collection of movies and tv shows. More rumors started coming in that Disney wasn’t interested in the movie, or that they were going to dump it in Disney+ with little fanfare. Not even Boone knew about the movie until he received a call to finish the post-production. “When they called me right before I went to go make The Stand and said, ‘Would you come finish the movie?’ I said, ‘I would f—in’ love to come finish the movie!’” While we may never know what the original plans for The New Mutants were, it is interesting to see how fans will react to the movie now, and more importantly, will this movie have any effect on the larger MCU.
The New Mutants is set to premiere April 3, 2020, directed by Josh Boone. Starting Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, Blu Hunt, and Alice Braga.