Sometimes a movie is exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re a fan of the coming of age or teen horror genres and the Xavier school superheroes weren’t exactly your thing, you have a new darker team of superheroes arriving on home streaming platforms this month in The New Mutants. The most eagerly awaited movie in years is here, one we’ve previewed and re-previewed new trailers for so many times we’ve almost lost count, all due to the 20th Century Studios merger into Disney and a pandemic. Much better than X-Men: Dark Phoenix and X-Men: Apocalypse, those who are bored with over-the-top, end-of-the-world plots and love the personal stories of the X-Men in the pages of Marvel Comics–and were really, really patient–will find it was worth the wait.
The most eagerly awaited movie in years received some nice treatment this week as part of San Diego Comic-Con@Home. We’ve previewed and re-previewed new trailers for The New Mutants probably more than any other movie in our past decade of coverage here at borg (just type The New Mutants in the search box to the right and you’ll see it all). The new and improved, post-merger 20th Century Studios even nicely mocks the delayed release dates in its Comic-Con@Home panel footage below, which features the director, cast members, and the legendary comic artist most closely aligned with The New Mutantsby way of his 1980s artwork, Bill Sienkiewicz. It also previews the entire opening scene and a trailer with new content from the film. All in all, some good stuff for a very patient fanbase for a film made in the summer of 2017.
Disney and Fox have no expectations for this one, so it would be great for X-Men fans to see it in the theater and make known the X-Men are as important to fans as the Avengers, twenty years after the first X-Men movie arrived in theaters.
We’re hoping The New Mutants was worth the wait. At last we have a trailer that shows the potential of these characters, with this week’s release of the final trailer for the final film of the longest running continuous superhero movie franchise, Fox’s X-Men. This is movie #13, and with it, the first horror superhero movie for Marvel. April 13, 2018, was the original release date for the movie, but it was bumped a few times by the studio to accommodate bigger superhero stories including Deadpool 2 and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, and then Marvel movies after the merger of Fox and Disney. We previewed it here at borg more than two years ago. It looks like M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass (and even co-stars that movie’s Anya Taylor-Joy) merged with the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, with Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton carrying forward the Johnny Depp look. Or a really haywire The Breakfast Club. As a result of the success of modern horror stories like Get Out and It, the original cut is in final reshoots by director Josh Boone to make it scarier. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s also easy to envision these mutant kids as an offshoot or tie-in story related to the lab that produced Laura aka X-23 in James Mangold’s Academy Award-nominated Logan.
And speaking of Anya Taylor-Joy, the film was made before these young actors’ careers really took off. Taylor-Joy filmed Split just before this and then Glass, was a lead voice (of Brea) in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and in Playmobil: The Movie, starred in Peaky Blinders, and filmed the lead role in a new remake of Emma, with five other films coming out in the next year. Maisie Williams grew up on Game of Thrones. And since filming The New Mutants,Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, and Blu Hunt have appeared in several movies and TV shows. The bad news of the reshoots is that Jon Hamm’s character Mister Sinister was reportedly cut entirely.
It’s the original roster of New Mutants (Cannonball, Mirage, Sunspot, and Wolfsbane), plus Magik from the second roster. Finally! Check out this great new trailer for The New Mutants:
