Josh Boone, director of upcoming X-Men spinoff film The New Mutants, revealed that the film will have a distinct shift in genre.
Josh Boone, who also directed the 2014 teen romance The Fault in Our Stars, told Entertainment Weekly about the film: “There are no costumes. There are no supervillains. We’re trying to do something very, very different.” The New Mutants will star Anya Taylor-Joy and Maisie Williams as the X-Men Magick and Wolfsbane respectively.
“We love that Fox wants to make all these X-Men spinoffs as drastically different as they can,” Boone continues. “Drastically different” describes not only Fox’s X-Men spinoffs quite well, but the entire superhero genre, too. And if we can trust Logan, the most recent critically-acclaimed X-Men film, then we can expect wild success from “horror-teen-superhero” movie The New Mutants.
The original X-Men boasted only one intense battle scene, compared to the two-and-a-half hour CGI explosions of our recent Avengers movies.
X-Men started a revolution in superhero films because of the rest of its runtime was a madly compelling character drama about cursed social outcasts Logan and Rogue. Following its lead, the most recent franchise entry, Logan, is already being called the greatest superhero movie ever by some. The film prioritized character drama and the bloody affects of a brutal Western over the conventional patterns and tropes of its contemporaries.
One of our favorite superhero movies of last year was another that felt like “more than” a regular superhero movie. Deadpool is an inappropriate meta-comedy, not to mention one of the highest-grossing R-rated films ever. We really seem to like superhero films that dip their toes in other genres’ waters. They’re also the ones we remember.The Dark Knight, the main contender with Logan for the “Best Ever” title, followed the conventions of a philosophical crime drama more so than those of a comic-book movie.
Needless to say, beautiful things happen when superheros flirt with different genres. An X-Men horror film is insanely exciting. Anya Taylor-Joy, Hollywood’s new “Scream Queen,” known for her roles in The Witch and Split, will play Illyana Rasputin, aka Magick, a sorceress in addition to being a mutant. Maisie Williams, our favorite faceless assassin Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, is Rahne Sinclair, aka, Wolfsbane, a werewolf. Yes, a werewolf. We’re in good hands.
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The New Mutants is slated for a spring 2018 release. It begins production in July 2017.