The longer it takes for The New Mutants and X-Men: Dark Phoenix to finish their respective journeys to cinemas, the more this pair of X-Men films feel like awkward unfinished business that Fox is begrudgingly delivering before Disney relieves them of the property and gives these tired mutants the reboot they need.
While another delay was recently announced for Dark Phoenix, it’s difficult to say what the future has in store for the production of New Mutants, with producer Simon Kinberg telling Collider that the film’s planned reshoots aren’t yet completed. What’s more, Kinberg says that it’s currently up in the air whether or not the mutant horror movie might get a PG-13 rating or an R.
“It’s the kind of movie that could go R, or it could be a hard PG-13,” said Kinberg. “As I was saying before in terms of subgenres or the genre, it is obviously teased as a horror film, and most horror films these days are R-rated, but it stars a very young cast, so we’ll see. It really is what the movie wants to be. The studio is open to either rating… Traditionally, superhero movies are PG-13 other than Logan and the Deadpool movies, and generally, horror films are R-rated, so we’ll see where this one falls. It is a very scary, edgy movie.”
Previous reports suggest a lot of behind-the-scenes conflict over what sort of a film New Mutants ought to be, whether it’s a full-fledged horror movie, or a softer kind of superhero flick that the kids can go to see. In light of the success of Fox’s Logan and the Deadpool, you’d think that the studio would be willing to grant this upcoming film the creative freedom of a more mature rating, but as Kinberg implies, having a younger cast does potentially complicate things.
Anyway, as far we know, The New Mutants is still planned to hit theaters on August 2nd, 2019, and for what it’s worth, star Anya Taylor-Joy claims that it’s going to be fantastic. In the meantime, Dark Phoenix is scheduled to come out just a couple of months prior on June 7th.