It’s been close to two years since the original planned released date of The New Mutants. The X-Men horror spinoff was initially supposed to grace the big screen in April 2018, but due to a bunch of production issues, it was pushed back multiple times. At the time it was rumoured, reported and speculated that midway through production, Fox studio executives asked director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) to make a more YA-esque movie instead of a straight-up horror film the director envisioned. Once principal photography wrapped, studio executives changed their minds, this time telling Boone to make New Mutants in line with his original vision.
Well, according to director Josh Boone, a lot of what was on the internet was simply not true. There were no reshoots whatsoever. Here’s what actually happened: The New Mutants was in limbo because of the Disney-Fox acquisition. After all, The New Mutants was initially conceptualised as a continuation of Fox’s X-Men universe. But now that that no longer exists, Disney didn’t know what exactly to do with New Mutants. Hence the movie was pushed back over and over again. Speaking with EW, director and co-writer Josh Boone had this to say:
Everybody said we did reshoots! We’ve never done reshoots. And I’ll tell you this: if there hadn’t been a merger, I’m sure we would’ve done reshoots the same way every movie does pickups. We didn’t even do that because by the time the merger was done and everything was settled, everybody’s older.
Boone didn’t hear anything from Disney nor Fox for about a year, while the acquisition was being finalised. The director eventually moved on to making the CBS All Access miniseries, The Stand. After the dust settled, Disney eventually hit Josh Boone up and asked if he’d like to return to complete his baby. Naturally, Boone said yes.
In the editing, we were probably 75 percent done. We came back and finished it up. It took a couple months, and it was nice to be able to come back. Knate [Lee], my co-writer, and I, we hadn’t seen it in a year. We did a bunch of things here and there that we hadn’t thought about or noticed a year before.
The New Mutants is set to hit the big screens this 2 April 2020.
