The New Mutants is going to Suck!
The Director of New Mutants, Josh Boone was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly and was quoted as saying:
“We are making a full-fledged horror movie set within the X-Men universe,” director Josh Boone says. “There are no costumes. There are no supervillains. We’re trying to do something very, very different.” Full Interview HereBoone goes on to exclaim about his love for Bill Sienkiewicz and how the artist's work on New Mutants (#16 on) made the books go darker, and more surrealistic than previous comics. Boone wants to make the movie less about Super Heroics and more about teenagers in a "horrorific" situation who just want to survive.
When this went out to the geekosphere there was an almost immediate response "Like Oh My Gawd what are they doing? Thats what Fantastic Four did! Oh that its going suck. Oh and let me take a Selfie" Thats right I interwove the clubber chick voice with a geek voice to make a totally stupid sounding voice in order to make a point that knee jerk reactions like this are ussually stupid. I will go further and say "click baity" title and picture (I actually find the picture pretty funny) were TRICKS. I actually led you into thinking this post was going to be about why New Mutants is going to Suck, INSTEAD its about how I have no idea if it will suck or not.
Lets take a breath here and think about this and think about a few things.
1) The horror ideas of Josh Trank in Fantastic Four were not bad, it was his execution on making a film that made that movie terrible. Also the sense of horror of seeing ones body changed by powers lends itself much more to New Mutants as a property than it does Fantastic Four.
2) New Mutants are like the 20th best Mutant Team in Marvel and if you were not reading in the 80s or 90s you may know nothing about them other than Deadpool made his first apperance in New Mutants #98. If there is an X / Marvel Mutant property that you are allowed to experiement and do something new with, then this is it. More over as Boone eloquently pointed out the comic of New Mutants did the exact same thing.
3) The not having the super hero save the world plot should be welcomed by everyone. Most great comic stories don't involve it but it has become a laughable fixture of the films. When only one or two comic films were coming out a year it was ok, but now with so many of them they need to change things up. This is a great place to change things up.
Could New Mutants Suck.......Yes, it could. However, so far I see nothing that gurantees it anymore than any other film. Moreover, this direction excites me much more than if we went the typical route. The New Mutants as a property almost need to do something like to make it interesting. Also I think the actors they are assembling are all good. I like Maisie Williams who will play Wolfsbane, I like Anya Tayler who plays Magik.
One more line from Boone and the Entertainment Weekly that you should consider:
“You can’t have a bigger nerd or fan making this. It’s so important to me. I’m not the 12-year-old who decided to write Stephen King a letter and loved Marvel Comics anymore, but I try to hold myself accountable to that kid. Because that kid is what keeps me from becoming a Hollywood whore"
So stepping back from the nerdosphere noise I think this project is on a good path, lets see where it goes. I'm hoping it does somewhere really interesting.
I will leave you with some pictures from New Mutants #18, #19 with the Demon Bear story to give you a taste of what is influencing the direction of the film. I also added Covers of New Mutants 25 and 26 which is the Legion story. You may be familiar with the Legion stories from the show Legion. Its from this same period that Boone is mining in New Mutants. These stories were from the early 1980s.
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