‘New Mutants’ Director Says Production Was So “Traumatic” That He “Never” Wants To Make Another X-Men Film
Though he has nothing but love for its cast and crew, The New Mutants director Josh Boone has admitted to finding the experience of making the X-Men’s final pre-MCU film so “traumatic” that he outright never wants to dance with Marvel’s Merry Band of Mutants ever again.
On paper, the last of the silver screen X-Men outings to be produced by Fox, had all the makings of being at least a moderate box office success when it entered production in 2017: It was adapting from one of Marvel Comics’ most popular and critically acclaimed series, the overall superhero genre was hitting its peak, and its cast was composed of both hot and rising stars like Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Charlie Heaton.
However, thanks to the unfortunate combination of Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, which caused the film to suffer massive mid-production delays and studio meddling, and audiences’ avoidance of theaters due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The New Mutants would crash and burn when it finally released in 2020, ultimately pulling in just $47 million against a reported budget of $67 million.
And like many, many fans, Boone walked away from the experience both disappointed and frustrated with the entire affair,
Far from fans being the only ones disappointed in the titular team’s big budget mishandling, Boone recently admitted to The Direct‘s Nathan Johnson that he had also walked away from The New Mutants with the same, albeit slightly more frustation-based sentiment.
Asked if he would ever agree to helm another New Mutants or general X-Men film, Boone explained, “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.
“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… I’d rather just never do it again, just to be honest.”
Sadly, while the film has long been relegated to the world of non-MCU canon and Boone is no longer interested in ever hearing the term ‘X-gene’ ever again, there was once a time when The New Mutants was being developed as the first of an eventual trilogy.
As he explained to IGN immediately following the film’s announcement in 2017, “We brought it to FOX as a trilogy of films, really all based on that long New Mutants Vol. 1 run by Sienkiewicz [and Chris Claremont], and kind of incorporates some stuff from later issues in the ’80s.
“These are all going to be horror movies, and they’re all be their own distinct kind of horror movies. This is certainly the ‘rubber-reality’ supernatural horror movie. The next one will be a completely different kind of horror movie.
“Our take was just go examine the horror genre through comic book movies and make each one its own distinct sort of horror film. Drawing from the big events that we love in the comics.
Boone would provide further details as to his now-cancelled plans during a 2020 interview with SlashFilm, as given in the aftermath of the Fox X-Mem universe’s official shuttering:
“So after I made [The] Fault [in Our Stars], I ran back to Fox and said, ‘You’ve gotta let me develop New Mutants.’ [The New Mutants co-writer] Knate [Lee] and I made them a comic book, which was like a PDF where we’d gone and taken frames from all these comics we love and strung them into a vision for what the series was going to be.
“The characters we chose were always the characters – we had plans, obviously, to bring in new characters in the next movie – the character of Warlock was featured in all the early drafts of the script, but it was so expensive that we weren’t able to do it. Basically, cutting him out of the narrative allowed us to make the film. So our plan was always to have Warlock come back in the next one and try to tell his story then.
“They were all supposed to be kind of separate horror genre films: the first one’s like a rubber reality horror movie, the second one was supposed to be an alien invasion movie with Warlock, and then the third one was going to take all these elements from the X-Men crossover from the late ’80s and early ’90s called Inferno to be a kind of supernatural, apocalyptic horror movie. That was the plan.”
NEXT: Marvel Comics Exec Editor Has One “Abiding Commandment” For X-Men Writers: “Make The Readers Cry”
