The worst part of The New Mutants coming out this coming April is that there are already people that are jaded against it in a big way. Of course that’s kind of natural, but it’s also likely a product of people getting tired of how the X-Men have been mishandled and how long it’s actually taken this movie to get to the big screen. The hope of course is that it’s a straight shot to a release now and that there won’t be anymore snags along the way since already the movie looks like it might be one of the better mutant flicks to come along given that the New Mutants are still a known commodity to Marvel fans but never really managed to snag as much renown as their older counterparts. Being a fan of the New Mutants since learning about them in the 80s it’s been hard not to get excited about seeing some of the most popular members of the group on the big screen since all of them had their part in creating the group in the beginning and to be fair a couple of them grew to be on par with several of the X-Men in terms of power. We’ve even seen at least one of the original members in the X-Men movies since Sunspot, Roberto Acosta, makes for a very powerful figure on the big screen. If you don’t recall he was feature in X-Men: Days of Future Past and helped to fight against the Sentinels, falling along with the others unfortunately.
Funny enough, Wolfsbane, Cannonball, Sunspot, Karma and Mirage were original members, while Magik was not. But bringing Ilyana Rasputin, that’s right, the younger sister of Peter Rasputin, aka Colossus, is a stroke of genius since she’s easily one of the more dangerous and more powerful members of the group. Unfortunately she’s also one of the least stable characters since the realm that she can travel to thanks to her mutant ability is able to travel to Limbo and to just about any place on the planet. The only problem is that when Ilyana does this she tends to attract the unwanted attention of other entities that are able to pretty much the same thing but are just as powerful if not more so. Cannonball, who became the leader of the group at one point, is hopefully going to come out and be his regular self since in the trailer at this point it does appear as though he’s building up to the kind of explosion that could send him rocketing on his way, but has yet to show just his full potential. Sunspot is already a known commodity and it’s pretty obvious what he’s all about, while Wolfsbane is more or less a natural lycanthrope as she can turn herself into a wolf-like creature and back again. The only issue with any of those on this team is that they are young, and their powers are sometimes a little beyond their control. In fact the only one that looks to have anything firmly in hand is Ilyana, and so far that looks more like bravado than anything.
But thus far the movie looks enticing since it also has the look of a horror movie on top of being another mutant-driven picture. The big bad isn’t a certainty yet but it’s likely to be someone and/or something extreme given the level of power that the characters possess, and the mere idea that they’re being interred in this broken down old institution to be ‘fixed’ is common thread that runs through a lot of X-Men comics and their outlying spin-offs, which is kind of what the New Mutants is. It’s uncertain whether there will be any cameos but it would be great to see some of the other stars from the movies show up at the end or perhaps at the beginning or anywhere in the movie for that matter since a lot of the X-Men, from Professor X to Magneto to many others, have had something to do with the New Mutants at one point or another.
Already it feels as though the critics are going to be lining up to tear this movie apart, but if there’s more to be seen past the trailers then it does appear as though we might be in for a treat as this could be one of Marvel’s first actual horror movies, AHEAD of the next Dr. Strange movie. Of course it’s not connected to the MCU so it won’t count and a lot of people might not even call it a horror movie, but thankfully none of that matters since the movie is on its way and it already looks like it’s going to be awesome. Jeremy Conrad of MCU Cosmic has more to offer on this subject. A new wave of mutants is finally hitting the screen, so hopefully we can expect more to come in the future.
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