Josh Boone has reflected on the complicated experience he suffered while making the superhero horror movie, The New Mutants, saying he has no interest in returning to the Marvel Universe anytime soon. After breaking out with his hit film The Fault in Our Stars, Boone spent five years working on The New Mutants, a planned spin-off of the X-Men film franchise that became infamous for its multiple release date changes. Boone’s next film, this year’s Regretting You, is a return to form for the director and his first film in five years since New Mutants, and arrives eleven years after The Fault in Our Stars.
Speaking with The Direct, Josh Boone looked back at the difficult time he had making The New Mutants. “We didn’t really get to make the movie we wanted to make. We made half the movie we wanted to make. And the release was so compromised by the pandemic,” he explained. Boone certainly doesn’t seem to have any interest in returning to the X-Men universe or big franchise filmmaking again, saying, “I’d rather just never do it again, just to be honest.” Boone later went into what he described as the “traumatic” experience of making The New Mutants, and how the film was caught in a storm of reshoots that never happened, the Disney acquisition, and the COVID-19 pandemic, saying:
“It’s so hard because it was so traumatic. The studio was sold, and we hit a pandemic… The studio was sold during the shooting, and then the pandemic happened when they decided to release it. And it just was such a — I had a wonderful time. I love the cast so much, but making that… It took so many years, and it was so unfulfilling, ultimately.”
The Long Road to Get ‘The New Mutants’ to the Big Screen
Boone began work on The New Mutants in 2014, shortly after the release of The Fault in Our Stars. He was officially announced as the director in 2015, and the cast was assembled in the summer of 2017, with filming taking place between July and September of that year. The film’s first teaser trailer dropped on Oct. 13, 2017, in time for Friday the 13th, with the movie set to open in theaters on April 13, 2018. However, that trailer, which was cut to emphasize the film’s horror elements in the wake of It‘s box office success, led 20th Century Fox to delay the film and send it for reshoots to more align with the trailer.
The film was initially delayed from April 2018 to Feb. 22, 2019. However, at the same time, Disney began its acquisition of 20th Century Fox, putting all plans for the X-Men film franchise, including Boone’s pitch for a New Mutants trilogy, on hold and eventually canceled. The New Mutants would again be delayed to August 2019, with Dark Phoenix taking its planned February 2019 release date before that film would be delayed to June 2019. The reshoots were delayed so long that they were eventually scrapped entirely. The film was set for an April 2020 release but was pulled when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
In the end, Disney, which acquired the film from the 20th Century Fox acquisition, decided to dump The New Mutants in a limited number of theaters and PVOD during the pandemic on Aug. 28, 2020, a little less than three years after audiences got their first look at the initial teaser back in 2017. At the time, this was seen as the last entry in the 20th Century Fox X-Men era, though actors and characters have since returned in Deadpool & Wolverine and will be back in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. Though don’t expect to see any of The New Mutants cast members in the MCU, as the film was notably the only 20th Century Fox era film not included in the Deadpool & Wolverine closing montage.
- Release Date
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August 26, 2020
- Runtime
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99 minutes
- Writers
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Josh Boone, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Knate Gwaltney, Scott Lobdell, Bob McLeod
- Producers
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Lauren Shuler Donner, Michele Imperato Stabile, Stan Lee, Karen Rosenfelt