There are a lot of interesting angles you can take when discussing the upcoming superhero horror film, “The New Mutants.” There’s all the reshoot drama. The massive delays. And of course, the will-they-or-won’t-they rumors about Disney releasing the film after the Fox merger. However, in terms of the grand scheme of franchise, big-budget filmmaking, “The New Mutants” holds the distinction as being one of the very few superhero films that will likely never see a sequel, no matter how much money it makes. That being said, despite that knowledge, director Josh Boone definitely has ideas for future installments, even if they’re a moot point.
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The issue that Boone and “The New Mutants” face is that the film is the last leftover of a Fox ‘X-Men’ shared universe that has been going since 2000. And if Fox stayed independent, “The New Mutants” was being set up as a potential franchise. However, since the Disney acquisition of Fox and the ‘X-Men’ characters, it’s been widely known that a reboot was imminent and “The New Mutants” represents the very end of a two-decades-long era.
Of course, director Josh Boone is hoping for the best and has ideas for what a potential franchise for “The New Mutants” might look like, as he told EW.
“Each one is its own unique kind of horror movie,” Boone said. “The first one is this supernatural horror movie. I won’t say what the other two are. They’re horror movies but different horror movies each time.”
The filmmaker also teased that there was an end-credits scene that was set to be filmed but never happened that introduced a new villain, Emmanuel da Costa (father of a member of the young mutant team), played by Antonio Banderas, which would lead into the second film of the proposed trilogy.
“We always intended to do ‘New Mutants: Brazil’ as the second movie,” Boone teased.
In addition to Banderas, the film would also introduce comic book characters such as Warlock, a techno-organic hero, and Karma, who has the ability to possess other beings.
He added, “Karma was always going to be the villain in the second movie that would be absorbed into the group by the end. We had always wanted to bring Karma and Warlock into the second one when we couldn’t do it in the first one. For us, we wanted that initial core team .”
As mentioned, it would take a miracle for “The New Mutants” to survive as a franchise past this first film, considering Marvel Studios probably has its own ideas on how to include the ‘X-Men’ characters into its existing universe. But even still, Boone is hopeful that “The New Mutants” can survive.
“In our heart of hearts, we hope [‘The New Mutants’] makes a bunch of money so that we can go make the second one,” the filmmaker said. “We’re all just bummed at everything that happened. Just the merger and everything else. It had nothing to do with us personally and had an impact on every single movie at Fox at the time.”
“The New Mutants” arrives in theaters on April 3.