One of the biggest franchises of the modern era went out with a whimper last summer when The New Mutants was sent to die at the box office in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic ravaging the theatrical industry, but at least it finally managed to hit the big screen at all after sitting on the shelf for years and being moved around the calendar on an alarmingly regular basis.
It was an ignominious end for the thirteen-film X-Men series, which had generated more than $6 billion over the previous 20 years and given us some all-time superhero movie greats including X2, Days of Future Past, Logan and Deadpool. Unfortunately, The New Mutants failed to even reach $50 million globally, and had to bat away accusations that it was the worst mutant blockbuster yet for good measure.
Josh Boone’s horror-tinged Marvel spinoff certainly wasn’t the best, and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 35% puts it nearly at the bottom of the critical pile ahead of only the disastrous Dark Phoenix, but it wasn’t an offensively bad movie by any means. The extensive reshoots left The New Mutants as a tonally jumbled mess that doesn’t tell much of a coherent story, but there are several good ideas in the script and hints of a much better film that got left in the dirt somewhere along the line.
However, while it’s already faded from the public consciousness as the focus on the mutants pivots towards the Marvel Cinematic Universe reboot, the movie has been posting a very strong showing on Hulu. At the time of writing, it’s the sixth most-watched flick on the platform, proving that the wider world of the X-Men hasn’t completely lost its lustre just yet.
