Let it be known that New Mutants isn’t your typical X-Men movie.
For starters, it chronicles the story of five young and gifted individuals – namely Magik, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, Cannonball and Mirage – confined to a super-secret government facility. Drawing comparisons to The Breakfast Club and even Ken Kesey’s beloved One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fox has appointed Josh Boone director of the 2018 spinoff, and while chatting to Variety, the studio’s chair and CEO Stacey Snider touched on some of the elements that lend New Mutants its “own personality.”
Coming off the one-two punch of Deadpool and Logan, two R-rated gems that scored massive box office numbers, 20th Century Fox is riding high, as evidenced by its plans for not one, not two, but three X-Men tentpoles in 2018. That places New Mutants in the company of giants (see: Deadpool 2, Dark Phoenix), though Snider is confident Boone’s offshoot will be able to stand on its own two feet.
Featuring an enviable cast of up-and-coming talent, New Mutants has welcomed the likes of Anya Taylor-Joy (Split), Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) and Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) into its midst, which ought to lead to some cracking scenes involving Hollywood’s best and brightest young stars.
Per Variety:
Great effort has been put into making sure they’re differentiated. New Mutants is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It’s like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they’re dangerous. The only solution is to put them in a Breakfast Club detention/Cuckoo’s Nest institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it’s strange and combustible inside. The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven’t seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like The Shining than ‘we’re teenagers let’s save the world.’
Angled as more of a horror movie than anything else, New Mutants is due to arrive on April 13th, 2018.