Josh Boone Says ‘New Mutants’ Will Launch Trilogy Of Horror Films

Earlier this yearStacey Snider, the chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox, explained the studio’s approach to giving some flavor to the superhero movies in their X-men line.

“If we’re going to make a superhero movie, we have to ask ourselves: What’s our version? What’s a Fox Marvel film? When you look at films like ‘Deadpool‘ or ‘Logan’ or the upcoming ‘New Mutants,’ you’ll see they have their own personality. Great effort has been put into making sure they’re differentiated. ‘New Mutants’ is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It’s like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they’re dangerous,” she explained. “The only solution is to put them in a ‘Breakfast Club‘ detention/’Cuckoo’s Nest‘ institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it’s strange and combustible inside. The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven’t seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like ‘The Shining’ than ‘we’re teenagers let’s save the world.’ ”

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That description of “New Mutants” put fans on alert, and the first trailer confirmed that it was something very different than your standard spandex and capes film. Dark, moody, and yes, even a little scary, “New Mutants” marks the beginning of what the director hopes will be a series of superhero flicks doing something very different.

Chatting with IGN, Josh Boone reveals that should all go well, “New Mutants” will kick off a series of superhero flicks that will lean hard on genre influences.

“We brought it to Fox as a trilogy of films, really all based on that long run by Sienkiewicz, and kind of incorporates some stuff from later issues in the ’80s,” he said. “These are all going to be horror movies, and they’re all be their own distinct kind of horror movies. This is certainly the ‘rubber-reality’ supernatural horror movie. The next one will be a completely different kind of horror movie.”

“Our take was just go examine the horror genre through comic book movies and make each one its own distinct sort of horror film. Drawing from the big events that we love in the comics,” Boone added.

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That’s actually a pretty terrific idea, and one that opens up the possibilities of what you can do with the superhero genre. “New Mutants” will be first out of the gate on April 13, 2018.