6 Years Ago, Fans Said a Bitter Farewell to a Massive Marvel Movie Era

The first X-Men paired Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto with a young ensemble that introduced most mainstream audiences to the mutant characters. X2 deepened the relationships from the first film and drew even stronger reviews and box office results. Then, X-Men: The Last Stand arrived under director Brett Ratner after Bryan Singer departed the project, and it split audiences by killing off major characters and rushing to close storylines that had needed better development. It was as if somehow 20th Century Fox didn’t trust the franchise and felt the need to put an end to it all in the same movie. The disappointing reception of The Last Stand led to years of course correction, with Fox’s frequent juggling of cast and crew leading both to acclaimed movies such as X-Men: Days of Future Past and Logan and maligned projects like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. The New Mutants entered that unstable environment as Fox’s next experiment, but instead closed the entire mutants’ saga.

The New Mutants reached theaters on August 28, 2020, after a production and release process that stretched across five years and five separate release dates. Directed by Josh Boone from a script he co-wrote with Knate Lee, the film reimagined the X-Men spinoff as a horror-flavored story set inside an isolated psychiatric facility. Critics responded poorly, with the film currently holding a 36% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 43 out of 100 on Metacritic. Box office performance matched that reception, with a worldwide total of $49.2 million against a reported $67 million production budget. Boone had pitched The New Mutants to Fox as the opening chapter of a trilogy, with each installment built around a different horror subgenre drawn from Bill Sienkiewicz’s 1980s comic run. Instead of launching that trilogy, the film became the 13th and final installment of the Fox X-Men franchise, closing a run that began with the original X-Men in 2000. In this case, though, Boone is not the only person to blame for the flawed movie that we got to watch.

The Disney-Fox Merger Derailed The New Mutants

Production on The New Mutants wrapped in the fall of 2017, but Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox stalled its release for years. The film had already been pushed from its original April 13, 2018 release date to accommodate Deadpool 2 and X-Men: Dark Phoenix before the merger froze the project entirely. Reports at the time claimed the studio would reshoot the film to add characters such as Mister Sinister and Laura Kinney. It looked like The New Mutants would get a massive overhaul in the hands of Disney, but Boone later explained that the opposite happened. The director has said since then that the version that reached theaters uses the same footage his team shot in 2017, touched up only slightly once production resumed after the merger closed. The project was left without pickups of any kind, even the smaller adjustments most films receive after a first cut, because by the time Disney cleared the film to finish, the young cast had visibly aged past the point where new footage could match seamlessly.

On top of the delays getting in the way of necessary reshoots that only become apparent during editing, The New Mutants also had to deal with a tonal inconsistency that hurt reception. Boone built the story around haunted-house horror conventions, drawing on the genre-specific approach that had already worked for Fox on Deadpool and Logan. Fox’s marketing materials also leaned into that horror framing. Then studio messaging shifted toward positioning the film as a more conventional superhero origin story once Disney took over. That shift in emphasis, on top of a nearly finished film with little room for substantial changes, left The New Mutants caught between two identities. As a result, the finished film carries the marks of a production that changed ownership and creative direction mid-course without the ability to reconcile those changes on screen. In fact, Boone has talked at length about how challenging the whole process was, and how he wouldn’t do it again if given the opportunity.

The New Mutants Should Get Another Shot in the MCU

Marvel Studios already confirmed the next chapter for its mutants, with Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier helming an untitled film scheduled to open in 2028. So far, we know the new X-Men movie will feature Jean Grey (Sadie Sink), Cyclops (Kit Connor), Emma Frost (Samara Weaving), Professor X (Christopher Abbott), Rogue (Inde Navarrette), Storm (Maya Boyd), and Mister Sinister (Adam Driver), with more names expected to be announced in the future.

None of the New Mutants characters have yet been confirmed for the MCU, though the concept behind the 2020 film remains a strong candidate for future stories. Yet, Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton), Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga), and Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt) carry distinct powers and backstories that the original film never fully explored due to its constrained scope and troubled production. The confirmed reboot cast skews toward actors in their twenties who are only now stepping into X-Men roles for the first time, which makes it unlikely the original New Mutants cast returns as the same characters in the new continuity. Still, their take on the New Mutants is what makes the movie worth the while for fans, and also the reason why the film, while flawed, still has avid defenders. On top of that, the idea of using horror to explore the traumas caused by mutation and persecution is genuinely inspired, and since the MCU wants to keep expanding the presence of mutants in the world, The New Mutants offers an interesting template.

The New Mutants is currently available to stream on Disney+. Marvel’s X-Men reboot arrives in theaters on May 5, 2028