With Fox’s 2019 Superhero slate already announced, we can start to get an idea of where the studio wants to take the franchise. The three movies that they’re going ahead with — Deadpool 2, X-Men: Dark Phoenix and New Mutants — suggest that while solo movies are still going to play an important role in the X-Men Cinematic Universe, the cornerstone of the brand going forward will be team-centric. And while we already know what’s going on with Deadpool 2 and Dark Phoenix, the upcoming New Mutants is a mostly unknown quantity.
The thing is, though, that the movie is only a year away at this point. And while the film is only in preproduction, with only a single actor attached to the project, enough gears are starting to turn that we have a more than fair idea what to expect when it comes to this newer, younger X-team.
Starting at the top, Fox has hired on Josh Boone to both write and direct the film. Given that they describe the movie as a “Stephen King meets John Hughes-style horror movie,” it only makes sense that they chose the man whose known for The Fault in Our Stars — a sappy, young adult drama — and is currently attached to both Lisey’s Story and The Stand, two Stephen King adaptations.
That particular tonal cross-section of Stephen King and John Hughes seems to suggest that they’re looking to make the X-branded equivalent of Spider-Man: Homecoming, a movie that seems to put superheroics on the back-burner in favor of teenage hijinks and coming of age drama. Given that the movie’s working title was Growing Pains, which is about as adolescent as you can get, they seem to be doing their best to give us a more youthful take the X-franchise.
And that’s fine by me. Not every movie needs to be an action movie first and foremost. Deadpool already proved as much and it’s refreshing to see other movies start to follow suit.
The Stephen King half of the New Mutants equation comes from the story arc that they’re supposedly adapting for the new team’s debut film: The Demon Bear Saga. While the team had a few unrelated battles to settle into the dynamics of working together, this was their first major test as superheroes: hinted at as early as the comic’s third issue and appearing in full in its eighteenth.
The story features a demonic bear — a giant, clawing mass of fur and teeth — haunting the dreams of New Mutant Dani Moonstar, aka Mirage. He taunts the girl by claiming to have killed her parents and promises that it will hunt her down and kill her too. After mauling Mirage, the team chases it through a hospital into the extra-dimensional Badlands, where they must face it down in earnest.
The big question running through my head since the film was announced is how exactly do you differentiate a New Mutants movie from an X-Men one. On the big screen, the Xavier-lead a-team has largely co-opted the same function as the comics “Jr. team:” recruiting and training young mutants into a paramilitary strike team, with many members of the New Mutants appearing in the movies as full-blown X-Men (including Shadowcat, Sunspot and Blink). Where would the movies draw the line between the two?
While many of these questions persist, it’s obvious enough that they intend to both emphasize the youthful hijinks of an adult-free team while playing up the horrific uncertainty that comes with youth. And if it takes a Marvel-branded Freddy Krueger to do that, then I’m willing to go along for the ride.
It even seems that most of the original team will make an appearance in the movie. While only Professor Xavier (read: James McAvoy) is confirmed to appear in the movie so far, Boone has hinted at Magik (Colossus’ kid sister), Wolfsbane, Mirage, Cannonball, Sunspot and Warlock all coming along for the ride. Notably absent are Shadowcat (having essentially being grandfathered in to the X-Men despite her age), Karma (the original team leader) and Cypher (probably the team’s most famous member).
While I would like for a young Shadowcat to be on the team (she’d be the right age for when the movie’s set and be a recognizable face for loyal X-film fans), I can understand the hesitancy to do so. She was only ever a begrudging member and spent most of her time with the adult team. I can even understand Cypher’s apparent absence, as he was not a founding member and always shared a special relationship with the presumably absent Shadowcat. Besides, he’s basically the Gwen Stacy of the New Mutants: a great character in his own right, but best remembered from the one time he died in the comics.
What strikes me as being exceptionally odd, however, is the evident lack of Karma. Sure, her powers are a little “heady” to work around — she can possess other people — but it’s no more esoteric than any number of other psychic characters that Fox as introduced over the years. And more than just “another member of the team,” she’s its leader, making it as if they decided to leave Cyclops out of the original X-Men movie.
While none of the new team have been officially cast as of yet, there are rumors concerning who the studio is considering for the roles. Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones‘ Arya Stark, is supposedly in the running to play Wolfsbane. Anya Taylor-Joy, who played opposite of McAvoy in this year’s Split, is being considered for Magik. The Fault in Our Stars‘ Matt Wolff is also being eyed to play Cannonball.
This is also supposed to be the first in a trilogy of New Mutant films. If so, you can bet that it will be capped off with an adaptation of the Inferno story arc: New Mutants’ answer to the Dark Phoenix Saga. In that story, the demonic forces of Limbo are unleashed upon the world with the tormented Magik — that dimension’s ruler — at its epicenter. Hopefully that will be a considerably better adaptation than The Last Stand was for the Dark Phoenix.
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