‘New Mutants’ Will Be a ‘Full-Fledged Horror Movie’
Almost every day, adult comic book fans are reminded that they live in a world they could never imagined as kids. A big-budget Wonder Woman movie? A Deadpool sequel? Suicide Squad is one of the biggest franchises in the world? It’s really unbelievable.
The latest case in point for this mind-bending reality: After 17 years of making X-Men movies, Fox is beginning to adapt the other books in the X-family. Next up after Deadpool is New Mutants from The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone. Entertainment Weekly spoke with Boone and got a scoop about the project’s particulars. The film is based on the long-running Marvel series about a new class of X-Men recruits; Boone told EW that his version will look very different from all the X-Men movies to date:
“There are no costumes. There are no super-villains. We’re trying to do something very, very different.”
Boone also name-checked the great Bill Sienkiewicz, the artist whose run on New Mutants is considered as one of the best (and most unique) superhero comics of the 1980s. (His gorgeous artwork really is like no one else in the history of comics.) In another one of those is-the-real-life-is-this-just-fantasy-moments, Fox’s New Mutants will apparently be inspired by Sienkiewicz’s work. Though Boone didn’t offer any plot details to EW, they did get this, from “a source” who is not Boone:
“Held in a secret facility against their will, five new mutants have to battle the dangers of their powers, as well as the sins of their past. They aren’t out to save the world — they’re just trying to save themselves.”
To me, this is a smart approach. If you’re going to make an X-Men spinoff, don’t make something that looks like like the other X-Men movies, especially when another one of those is in the works as well. (X-Men: Dark Phoenix is supposedly coming soon too.) I don’t know that Boone has the visual chops to pull off a Sienkiewicz-inspired movie (and I hope Sienkiewicz gets to contribute if he wants). But if he does, New Mutants could be a very unique project. It’s currently scheduled for a spring 2018 release.