After nearly two years on the shelf, The New Mutants is almost ready to hit theaters this April. It also has the unwelcome distinction of being the last X-Men film produced by Fox. But according to director Josh Boone, The New Mutants was partially divorced from the franchise because of X-Men: Apocalypse.
ScreenRant has released a partial interview with Boone that was conducted on the set of The New Mutants. In this excerpt, he indicates that Fox took the wrong lesson from Apocalypse’s box office failure. And that mean characters like Storm and Professor X couldn’t appear in the film.
“You know, it was originally set…in the 80s universe with Professor X in it, with Storm in it, and with a bunch of other stuff,” said Boone. “When they got to Apocalypse, they didn’t want anything set in the past anymore, [lowers voice] like that was the reason it was bad… It’s like, the one before that in the 70s was pretty awesome. And the ’60s one was pretty great. They just wanted all this stuff moved up to the present day including the X-Men eventually in some way shape or form.”
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Boone added that “it didn’t really matter because they’re in such an isolated location without any Wi-Fi or phones or anything that it might as well be the 80s in terms of the setting,” continued Booone. “It didn’t change our story very much. It limited who we could use character-wise, but in some ways it made it better because it freed us from, uh – it’s really able to be its own thing. Which I appreciate more now than I did when had to make that decision. But yeah, we’re really excited about it.”
Because Boone’s comments were made well before the Fox and Disney deal was completed, they don’t address Dark Phoenix or the MCU at all. Still, it’s an interesting time capsule that explains why it will be so disconnected from the other X-Men films.
The New Mutants will hit theaters on April 3.
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