The New Mutants is finally about to arrive this August. The spinoff flick, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams and Charlie Heaton, will end up being the last chapter in Fox’s X-Men universe, but it certainly wasn’t intended that way. Josh Boone’s film was originally conceived in the wake of X-Men: Apocalypse, when the franchise appeared to be getting bigger and bigger. The movie we’ll see this summer is completely standalone, then, though this wasn’t always the case.
The @NewMutantsUpdates Twitter account has shared a revelation that Boone made in a new issue of SFX Magazine. As per the account, the director discussed how The New Mutants included a couple of major X-Men cameos in early drafts of the script, with James McAvoy’s Professor X and Alexandra Shipp’s Storm welcoming the titular teen mutants to the X-Mansion. These cameos were never filmed, though, as the story evolved to become more self-contained.
Josh Boone has confirmed that #NewMutants early draft would have featured the mutants in X-Mansion with Xavier (McAvoy) and Storm (Shipp) reprising their roles. The movie was also supposed to be in X-Men: Apocalypse timeline but that was later dropped to make it an standalone. pic.twitter.com/SZ39G32OJ7
— New Mutants Updates (@NewMutantsUp) May 27, 2020
Back in the day, this would have been a fun connection – much like how Deadpool 2 squeezed in some silent cameos for all of the Apocalypse X-Men team – not just McAvoy and Shipp. It’s probably for the best that those two didn’t make it into the movie, however. Probably the only reason that Disney is releasing it at all is because it works as a standalone film and doesn’t tie into the now defunct Fox franchise. That said, it would have been interesting to have it set in the 1980s.
The New Mutants has been the victim of numerous delays, with the movie wrapping production all the way back in 2017. The latest was due to the pandemic forcing cinemas to close, with its early April release pushed back until August 28th. Frankly, though, at this stage, we’ll only believe it’s actually coming out when we’re physically sitting in front of a screen that’s playing it.
