Principal photography on X-Men spinoff The New Mutants wrapped in September 2017, but it wouldn’t hit the big screen until almost three years later. During that time, extensive reshoots were ordered by Fox, which saw the movie delayed on multiple occasions, so many times in fact that Disney swooped in to purchase the company in the interim.
Indeed, fans were waiting so long to see it that instead of being the final X-Men adaptation released by Fox, it was the first distributed by the Mouse House instead. After being shuffled around the calendar several times, The New Mutants finally settled on a firm release date only for the Coronavirus pandemic to rear its head in the latest stroke of misfortune to hit the troubled project.
Josh Boone’s horror-tinged comic book film did eventually arrive last August and top the domestic box office in its opening weekend, but the theatrical industry was on its knees, so it bowed out with a global haul of just $46 million. Before that, of course, campaigns were launched in an effort to have it debut exclusively on Disney Plus, something Boone admitted was a legal and contractual impossibility.
That’s because Fox signed a ten-year agreement with HBO back in 2012 for first-run streaming and television rights to all of the former’s major big screen properties, so we now find ourselves in the unique situation of a movie produced by Fox and owned by Disney making its home on a platform controlled by Warner Bros. When the contract expires next year there’s every chance that The New Mutants will pitch up on Disney Plus, which is slowly but surely acquiring all of Fox’s superhero titles, but for now, you can find it streaming on HBO Max.
