New Mutants Director Reveals the Movie You Saw Wasn’t the One They Wanted to Make
After a chaotic rollout, The New Mutants still haunts director Josh Boone, who calls the experience unfulfilling: We didn’t get to make the movie we wanted.
Fox's X-Men era ended not with a bang, but with The New Mutants. If you remember the headlines, you probably remember the drama too. Writer-director Josh Boone definitely does, and he sounds like he has zero interest in living through anything like that again.
What went sideways
The New Mutants was supposed to be a smaller, spookier spin on the X-Men world. Instead, it got kneecapped by a perfect storm: the script got sanded down, reshoots happened, Disney bought Fox in the middle of production, and then a pandemic rolled in right when the studio tried to release it. That cocktail did the movie no favors, and critics let it have it.
Boone says he loved his cast and parts of the process, but the whole thing stretched on for years and left him cold.
"We didn’t really get to make the movie we wanted to make. We made half the movie we wanted to make. The studio was sold during the shooting, and then the pandemic happened when they decided to release it. I’d rather just never do it again, just to be honest."
What the movie actually was
The setup was solid: five young mutants are locked in a supposedly helpful facility that is very much not what it claims to be. Great idea on paper, and you can see the bones of the thing on screen, even if the final cut never quite clicks.
- Blu Hunt as Danielle Moonstar, aka Mirage - pulls fears out of your head and makes them real
- Maisie Williams as Rahne Sinclair, aka Wolfsbane - shapeshifts into a wolf
- Charlie Heaton as Sam Guthrie, aka Cannonball - launches himself like, well, a cannonball, protected by a force field
- Henry Zaga as Roberto da Costa, aka Sunspot - absorbs and channels solar energy
- Anya Taylor-Joy as Illyana Rasputin, aka Magik - Colossus's younger sister, wields a soul sword that boosts her psychic abilities
- Alice Braga as Dr. Cecilia Reyes - runs the hospital, mentors the group, and has her own agenda
Boone's next move
Boone has moved on. His new film, Regretting You, hits theaters on October 24. It is based on Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel and stars Allison Williams and Mckenna Grace as a mother-daughter duo forced to deal with the wreckage after a devastating accident exposes a major betrayal. Expect family secrets, messy love, and two people figuring out how to meet each other in the middle again.
And because the superhero carousel never stops: elsewhere in Marvel-land, Jon Hamm says he wants in on the MCU, maybe as Doctor Doom. File that under things that would absolutely get people talking.