The New Mutants Almost Featured James McAvoy’s Professor X

Against all the odds, The New Mutants is finally making it into cinemas this April, three whole years after it was shot. Though originally envisioned as an off-shoot of the mainline X-Men franchise, Josh Boone’s horror-flavored superhero movie is now going to be the final entry in Fox’s universe before Marvel reboots the mutantkind within the MCU. So, don’t expect any familiar faces in the film – though one of them almost made it in.

ScreenRant has shared an interview with the director from a set visit back in 2017. In it, Boone reveals that the spinoff was originally intended to be more closely connected to the mainline X-Men movies, taking place in the 1980s, around the time of X-Men: Apocalypse. What’s more, James McAvoy was supposed to have a role as Professor X.

The filmmaker didn’t elaborate too much about what this version would’ve been like, but he did make clear that Fox gave him free rein to make the movie he wanted:

“It’s funny man, they’re so emboldened by Deadpool and Logan and that they really let us – I can’t believe they’re letting us make this movie. If they knew all the stuff in this, I’m still like ‘Do they know how f-cked up this movie is?’”

Ironically, since the interview occurred, Fox did lose faith in Boone’s vision and attempted to retool the picture with a lengthy reshoot period – though these reshoots never happened. Instead, Disney is releasing the director’s original cut of the film, which has to be good news. Whether it ends up measuring up to the trailers or not, at least it won’t be another Dark Phoenix situation, which sounds like was harmed by its own extensive reshoots.

Speaking of, Dark Phoenix will go down as the last time we see McAvoy’s Charles Xavier. It would’ve been nice to get him back in the role just once more, but it’s probably for the best he’s not in the movie, so that The New Mutants can stand on its own. After all, if it’s successful, the team could be folded into the MCU.