How The Failure Of ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ Changed ‘The New Mutants’
By Jacob Hall/July 24, 2020 10:30 am EST
And it turns out that the reaction to Apocalypse had ramifications for The New Mutants, forcing co-writer and director Josh Boone to make some significant changes to the story.
We were lucky. They really did want it to be different than other stuff. They really pushed us to keep it separate from X-Men stuff, even though it’s set in the X-Men universe. We had early drafts that were supposed to be in the same timeline as [X-Men:] Apocalypse, so it was originally going to be set in the ’80s. Originally, Professor X and Storm were in it, and Storm very much played the Alice Braga role. Over the course of months, a new studio head came in, they said they didn’t want any X-Men movies to take place in the past anymore, as if that was the reason that Apocalypse was bad. [laughs] So we were put in the position where we kind of rewrote it to be set now in a nebulous [point in time], because nobody knew how the movies had turned out. Dark Phoenix wasn’t out yet. Yeah, it’s there – they talk about Professor X and those things, but it doesn’t have cameos from anyone or anything like that.
While the ’80s setting may have added to New Mutants’ horror tone, this sounds like it could’ve been a blessing in disguise. Rather than have any connection to the baggage of past X-Men movies, New Mutants is allowed to stand alone and let its new characters shine.
