If you’ll believe it, and you have every right not to after the constant stream of setbacks that have hit the project, The New Mutants is set to reach theaters on Friday.
Obviously a movie that’s sat on the shelf for years and been hit with a series of delays will finally arrive when the industry is still taking baby steps towards resuming operations due to the Coronavirus pandemic, but at least Josh Boone’s horror-tinged superhero story is finally putting itself out there.
We’re now 28 months removed from the release date that was originally handed out to The New Mutants, and in that time so much has changed that instead of being Fox’s final entry in the X-Men franchise, the mutant spinoff is now the first to fall under the Disney banner via the recently-renamed 20th Century Studios.
Fans had been hoping that it would end up bypassing theaters entirely and head straight to streaming to finally draw a line under the tortured development and production process, but contractual obligations meant that it was never a real possibility. While we’re close to finding out if all of the heavily-publicized issues have been worth it, we’ve also been hearing just as much about the characters that never made it into The New Mutants as the ones that did.
Following in the footsteps of Jon Hamm’s Mr. Sinister, Alexandra Shipp’s Storm and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Warlock, Boone has also revealed that fan favorite character Colossus also featured in many early drafts of the script before he found himself being dropped.
“There’s Superman III, the one where he loses his powers and goes back to Smallville. Is that one where he saves the kid from the thing going through the grass? We definitely wrote one where Ilyana was in like a field in Russia that was being tilled. And suddenly her brother comes in and you see all the armor come on him and stop the thing from running her over or whatever. We had stuff like that in earlier drafts that just got further and further away from a budget standpoint and everything else. Which is suddenly Ilyana rescued, and is Colossus’ sister.”
Anya Taylor-Joy’s Magik still plays a major role in The New Mutants, so even if the armored star of the Deadpool franchise didn’t make it into the shooting script, the Rasputin family remains well-represented.