New Mutants' director talks film's unique direction

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Submitted by Mike 'Ace' Maillaro on Thu, 05/25/2017 - 10:55

From Entertainment Weekly:

The New Mutants, the long anticipated X-Men spinoff movie, is going to be a comic book film that goes in an unusual direction. “We are making a full-fledged horror movie set within the X-Men universe,” director Josh Boone says. “There are no costumes. There are no supervillains. We’re trying to do something very, very different.”

Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams has been cast in the role of Wolfsbane and Split actress Anya Taylor-Joy as Magik. Sources close to the production say that Henry Zaga, seen most recently in 13 Reasons Why (where he played Tony’s boyfriend, Brad), will soon be announced in the role of Sunspot. (Unconfirmed chatter has it that Rosario Dawson is currently in talks as well.)

The New Mutants, which was created by Chris Claremont in the early ’80s, is about a group of teenage mutants, a kind of superheroes-in-training, who must learn to control their powers. When artist Bill Sienkiewicz — whom Boone calls “one of the most amazing comic book artists ever” — came aboard for No. 18 in 1984, the series took a turn for what Boone describes as, “a darker and more surreal and impressionistic X-Men series than we’d ever seen before. It felt like Stephen King meets John Hughes.”

The New Mutants is scheduled to go into production in July.

Source: Entertainment Weekly

Commentary: I have been a New Mutants fan for as long as I can remember. In fact, over the years, I have run several RPG's based around New Mutants. It is just a concept that has always had a lot of appeal to me.

I have actually seen a lot of people online saying things like "F*** this s*** Fox. Waited for years to see Magik on screen and she won't even have a damn superhero costume? WHY DOES FOX HATE SUPERHERO COSTUMES?" Personally, I give Fox a lot of credit for doing this. New Mutants was always VERY different from other superhero comics at the time. Horror and fantasy stories were often the norm in New Mutants. As much as I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for the most part, they all fall in the same genre. Fox has shown that superhero movies COULD be something very different with movies like LOGAN and DEADPOOL, not to mention the LEGION TV Series.

If nothing else, this seems like it could give me a film verion of Demon Bear, and I am completely on board with that!