It’s one of those movie projects that always seems to be wistfully mentioned, without any real progress ever being seen – but writer-director Josh Boone has now given an update on his New Mutants movie, and it seems that the whole thing is about to crank into high-gear. The film is based around the New Mutants story arc, which is spun off from the X-Men comic book series – with the team first appearing in 1982, in Marvel Graphic Novel #4, created by Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod.
The premise is that the characters in the story are mutant superheroes in training, and are variously mentored by Magneto, Professor X and Cable. The original team, in the source material, consisted of Sunspot (who appeared in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, and draws superhuman strength from the sun), Karma (who can mentally possess others), Cannonball (who becomes invulnerable when flying through the air), Mirage (who creates visual illusions) and Wolfsbane (who turns into a version of a wolf).
Speaking to Creative Screenwriting recently, Boone gave an update on the status of the highly anticipated film.
“We had loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s run with Chris Claremont that had Demon Bear. It was really dark, interesting, and different from the typical X-Men stories that we had read. After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book. It walked them through a trilogy of New Mutant films that would build on each other. We used this program called Comic Life, and took all the images we had loved from the series and strung them together to show them the movie we wanted to do. We brought it to Simon and he really liked it.
“We’ve been going for the past year and a half to get it ready, and I’m about to go location scout and we have a release date now.”
It’s rumoured that the title of the film will eventually be X-Men: The New Mutants – which would be the logical choice for 20th Century Fox. Though it’s not directly part of Bryan Singer’s tentpole X-Men franchise, the titular association with the same will almost certainly make a difference to box office returns – since the X-Men film series is a known, and beloved, quantity. Whether or not casting will continue the fleeting appearances of characters in other movies – for example, with Adan Canto as Sunspot – remains to be seen when the New Mutants film arrives in 2018.
