‘The New Mutants’ Isn’t a Lost Cause Yet

Despite all the storytelling reshuffling, including adding Antonio Banderas as a new villain, there’s hope for this ‘X-Men’ spin-off yet.

Blockbuster fans have basically been trained to fear the word “reshoots.” The mere idea that an initial vision wasn’t executed with 100% accuracy the first time around could send fandoms into a flurry of worry at the click of a mouse. For good reason, because sometimes reshoots result in something like Rogue One or the Fantastic Four reboot.

When news broke recently that The New Mutants is being pushed back a second time — the film is now slated for release in the back half of 2019 as opposed to February (originally it was due this month) — and that director Josh Boone and Fox execs have been butting heads on set, it was admittedly easy to be pessimistic. From the film’s promising first trailer, The New Mutants already feels like a step in a different direction for the X-Men brand, at least genre-wise. But based on the rumors, the horror tinge was an experiment the studio was unwilling to invest in.

The Tracking Board has some new information about what’s purportedly really happening behind the scenes of the film. While this may just fuel the fires of journalistic speculation that will ultimately be compounded by the aforementioned incessant nature of fan culture, several nuggets do stick out from their latest report. And they actually give us hope rather than more cause for concern over the fate of The New Mutants.

To begin, it’s a huge relief that Boone and Fox haven’t reached the point of “irreconcilable” in their “creative differences.” It’s true that the studio wasn’t keen on Boone’s initial horror ideas in the first place because the scares would mean giving up a PG-13 rating. However, both parties came to a kind of happy medium by shooting a creepy version of a YA movie; something like “a cross between Stephen King and John Hughes.”

In theory, such an X-Men film would’ve been fine on its own, given Boone’s experience in the YA genre — he helmed The Fault in Our Stars, and that film is perfectly functional. But this actually reined in more of Boone and co-writer Knate Lee’s original ideas than we’re comfortable hearing. A writer’s room was also brought together to re-conceptualize the New Mutants script multiple times until the horror element was sufficiently suppressed to Fox’s liking.

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