Remember back before Disney bought Fox and subsequently got Marvel movie rights to the X-Men? It was a time before the catastrophe that was Dark Phoenix. Fox had big plans for X-Men, including their own horror movie trilogy based on the X-Men franchise: The New Mutants.
Shortly after the Deadpool duo-logy and stand-alone blockbuster, Logan, pushed the X-Men into bold new territories - the Deadpools with their R-rated comedy and Logan with its R-rated, gritty, Western take - the New Mutants would have undoubtedly done the same, but this time, pushed the franchise into the horror genre. Josh Boone, director of The Fault in Our Stars, was the director of The New Mutants and his plans were to make the first movie about a new generation of mutants being held captive in a psychiatric ward and the horrors that arise from it; perhaps similar to the film Glass?
Boone had his eyes set on making a trilogy of horror films, which cropped up organically due to his love of 80’s X-Men comics. In an interview with Slashfilms, Boone said, “I guess the best way to talk about it is that it’s not like [co-writer Knate Lee] and I sat there like, ‘Yo, we’ve gotta make a horror comic book movie.’ We really wanted to make New Mutants, and it sort of organically became that… We loved Marvel Comics so much in the ‘80s, so all our references were really [from before] the movies… when I was a kid, I remember seeing these really evocative, scary, Bill Sienkiewicz covers for New Mutants, and I was like, ‘This ain’t like normal Marvel stuff.’ I’ve loved that Demon Bear [storyline] since then, and loved his artwork and thought it was unique and different and its own thing.”
Unfortunately, in the same interview, Boone expresses that there have been no talks with Disney about continuing his horror film project, stating, “I never had a conversation about it. I just can’t imagine that [Disney would] ever have a conversation about that unless the movie did the business and had the demand for them to have that conversation. At the same time, too, if I was them, I’d want a clean break… If there’s the demand for it, I think that it’s something that we’ll end up having a conversation about.”
Currently, we’re unsure if the movies will be made, but it’s very quickly looking like a resounding: no, unless of course, there’s a demand for it. How do you feel? Do you think an X-Men horror trilogy, heck, even just one horror movie, would’ve been good? Bad? Or, instead, are you happy the movie rights to X-Men are back with Marvel? Let us know in the comments!
By Nicholas James