When The New Mutants arrives in theaters this spring, fans will be watching an X-Men horror movie set in the modern day. But apparently, this wasn’t the original plan.
According to a new article by Collider, the movie was originally supposed to be set in the ’80s, featuring characters like Professor X and Storm. Speaking during a set visit in 2017, director Josh Boone told the publication that after X-Men: Apocalypse, the producers scrapped plans for films set in the past, bumping the entire story of New Mutants up to the present.
“It didn’t really matter because they’re in such an isolated location without any wifi or phones or anything that, it may as well be the 80s in terms of the set, it didn’t change our story very much,” Boone told Collider. “It limited though who we could use character-wise.”
So which X-Men characters got scrapped? Aside from Professor X and Storm, we have one other theory: Magneto.
In the comics, a reformed Magneto actually serves for a time as headmaster when the original New Mutants are students at the X-Men school, with the character taking on the role in 1986. Boone didn’t name any characters besides Professor X and Storm, but his quote did have us wondering whether Michael Fassbender’s Magneto was originally supposed to show up. We could easily see Mirage, Wolfsbane, Cannonball, Sunspot, and Magik getting cornered as they try to escape the compound at the end, only for Magneto to intervene just in time with Glorious Mutant Daddy Vengeance.
Of course, this is all just speculation, but either way, Boone’s comments could mean the whole X-Men: Apocalypse thing unintentionally brought The New Mutants CLOSER to being in the MCU. That is, Apocalypse causing the studios to step away from period films forced New Mutants to disconnect from the X-Men universe as a whole, thereby making it more suitable for the MCU after Disney’s Fox acquisition. As Cinema Blend puts it, the Disney-Fox merger means “new versions of classic mutants” will be slowly folded into the MCU. Collider thinks this could be a possibility as well, noting that Boone had originally pitched a trilogy of New Mutants horror movies.
The New Mutants is out April 3, 2020.
