‘The New Mutants’ Was Supposed To Kick Off A Trilogy Of X-Men Horror Films, Including An Alien Invasion Story
By Jacob Hall/July 23, 2020 2:30 pm EST
Despite the horror aesthetic of the film, Boone told us in a recent interview that he didn’t set out to make an X-Men horror film – it just happened organically as he started exploring the material:
In fact, the horror tone emerged directly from the X-Men comic book runs he enjoyed as a kid, which directly informed the characters and setting of the actual film:
I guess the best way to talk about it is that it’s not like [co-writer Knate Lee] and I sat there like, “Yo, we’ve gotta make a horror comic book movie.” We really wanted to make New Mutants, and it sort of organically became that, just through adapting the material. We just sort of wanted it to be as grounded and performance-driven as possible. We didn’t want it to look like any Marvel movies. We wanted to shoot on real locations. I did everything I could to make sure the aesthetic was not like anything else.
We loved Marvel Comics so much in the ’80s, so all our references were really [from before] the movies. There’s a whole generation now where that’s not the case, but it’s like, even when I was a kid, I remember seeing these really evocative, scary, Bill Sienkiewicz covers for New Mutants, and I was like, “This ain’t like normal Marvel stuff.” I’ve loved that Demon Bear [storyline] since then, and loved his artwork and thought it was unique and different and its own thing.
As part of his pitch to Fox, Boone literally assembled a comic book of his own, borrowing panels from X-Men books to sell the studio on the tone he was going for. And while the original pitch was modified due to budgetary constraints, he was able to envision a trilogy of X-Men horror movies, each one introducing new characters and exploring a different corner of the horror genre:
Right now, it seems highly unlikely that any of those sequels will get made. Boone confirmed to us that he never spoke to Disney about reworking The New Mutants to connect it to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But he also seems to be at peace with that:
I never had a conversation about it. I just can’t imagine that they’d ever had a conversation about that unless the movie did the business and had the demand for them to have that conversation. At the same time, too, if I was them, I’d want a clean break. Like I said, I can kind of step outside myself to talk about any of this stuff. But I imagine they’ll do their own thing, but certainly, the cast and I would love to go make another movie. If there’s the demand for it, I think that it’s something that we’ll end up having a conversation about. But to me, now, I’d just be thankful to get this one out so everybody can see it.
