Six years ago, work began on The New Mutants. Now, amazingly, it’s finally heading into cinemas on April 3rd. The film has had a tangled and chaotic path to the screen, with director Josh Boone clashing with the Fox higher-ups about the intensity of the horror elements. This back and forth resulted in planned reshoots and its release date getting pushed further and further back. Then, after the Disney/Fox merger, there was talk that the film might never be released at all.
Upon reviewing it in 2019, however, Disney assessed it as having “limited box office potential” and sent it back for more work to align with Boone’s original pitch. And now, after all of this drama, we’re finally going to get to see it. The new TV spot above appears to confirm that the movie will indeed play up the horror factor as well and includes some cool shots of Henry Zaga’s Sunspot wreathed in flames. Whatever else is going on is a bit difficult to see as the footage is so dark, but it at least looks to have a couple of quality jump scares.
Maisie Williams, who plays Wolfsbane, recently commented on the pic’s long and winding road to the screen in an interview with Sky, saying:
“It’s been a long time coming, we shot it many years ago, but I’m really proud of it finally coming out. It was a lot to do with the merger, I think it [the film] had a really bad rep and people thought there was going to be something wrong with it, but I honestly think it was just really badly affected by something that was out of our control.”
It’d be a real underdog triumph if The New Mutants ends up being a success. The April 3rd release date means it has no major box office competition for a while and perhaps audiences will recognize that this will be the last mutant-centered movie for quite some time. The project will also definitively cap off the two-decade-long 20th Century Fox era of the X-Men. That run of films had its ups and downs, sure, but it did so much to define what a contemporary superhero movie should be that it deserves to go out on a high note.