To the disappointment of X-Men fans everywhere, The New Mutants was recently moved back from its April 2018 release date to February 2019. The exact reason for the delay hasn’t been specified, but word has it that Fox plans to push the movie into more of a full-on horror direction, probably motivated by the great reception to the very spooky first trailer for the film.
As you can probably guess, The New Mutants is not your typical superhero pic, and to make that clear, the spinoff will be ditching one common aspect of the genre: the costumes. Director Josh Boone revealed to Empire that one thing which makes The New Mutants stand out is that the cast of misfit mutants – including Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams and Charlie Heaton – won’t don any kind of special outfit in the movie.
“There are no costumes. That alone makes [New Mutants] different,” he said in a recent interview.
This is the first time we’ve had this confirmed, but it’s not all that surprising. The New Mutants isn’t so much a superhero movie as just one that’s based off superhero comics. Given that the plot revolves around a group of institutionalized mutants with dangerous powers falling prey to a terrifying force that’s attacking them, it’s not really the sort of scenario that requires, as Cyclops might say, “yellow spandex.”
Likewise, it’s also not that surprising as the X-Men movie franchise has never been all that bothered about faithfully recreating the characters’ looks from the page. For most of the movies, the X-Men have donned nondescript black leather suits, though the final moments of Apocalypse at last introduced much more comics-accurate outfits for the team. Infamously, though, Hugh Jackman never wore Wolverine’s iconic yellow costume.
The New Mutants is now set to arrive in cinemas on February 22nd, 2019, while Deadpool 2 is the next X-Men universe movie on the way, hitting screens on May 18th.
