It’s time to look at The New Mutants, the final film from the
Fox X-men line. It’s an X-men film that had a pretty troubled production. The
idea was initially pitched in 2014, and was filmed in 2017, Professor X was
originally going to be in this but was written out alongside various other
x-men being slated to make an appearance, though these ideas were ultimately dropped. Fox was expecting for the film to
undergo substantial reshoots, getting the film pushed back from its initial
2018 release date. But their efforts were delayed by the Disney-Fox acquisition
and by the time Disney had completed their takeover, reshoots were no longer an
option as the young cast had aged out of the roles. Still, Disney wasn’t
exactly impressed with the product and did some work to increase the horror tone,
which was more in-line with the original vision of writer/director Josh Boone.
Still, at this point the film had not been fully edited, and
Boone was busy working on a Steven King adaptation, so he brought on editor
Andrew Buckland to finish the film. The film was set to be released in March
2020 but a little thing known as COVID-19 saw it delayed yet again to August.
Even then, this was Disney knowing this wasn’t going to be successful and
cutting their losses.
And they may have been right, the film got a pretty bad 35% Rating on Rotten Tomatoes and whilst it may have more outside of a pandemic, it made only $47m on it’s near $80m budget. Don’t think it would’ve been that successful either way, so let’s take a look and see what I thought…
