Marvel Comics
We’ve heard rumors of an X-Force movie for a while, but apparently Fox is going with another X-Men spin-off that could eventually lead into that other X-citing possibility. In the comics, before there was X-Force, there were the New Mutants, and so logically the latter is getting the movie treatment first, too. Deadline reports that this will be a standalone feature and that the studio has picked The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone to helm the comic book movie. Boone, who is also working on the new adaptations of Stephen King’s “The Stand” and Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles,” will also co-write The New Mutants with Knate Gwaltney, a Jackass producer now focusing on screenplays.
With Bryan Singer likely done with the X-Men franchise following next year’s X-Men: Apocalypse and many of the original character being recast, plus Hugh Jackman leaving the Wolverine role after that character’s next solo installment, The New Mutants will come along at the right time for yet another reboot of the universe. But the interesting thing about the franchise is it may never be completely rebooted, unlike we’ve seen with Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. Producers Laura Shuler Donner and Simon Kinberg have done clever things with timelines in the X-Men movies and have had no problem retconning characters and plots and allowing whole installments to be dismissed to the delight of fans who had already done so.
Some of the characters who presumably will appear in New Mutants are Cannonball, Sunspot, Karma, Mirage and Rictor, which would allow for an ethnically diverse cast. Plus they’ll have to include Warlock, who can sort of be this movie’s weird character element akin to Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. A few among the New Mutants’ rosters have previously appeared or been mentioned in the X-Men Cinematic Universe, such as Sunspot in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Many showed up on a mutant registry in X2: X-Men United with Mirage also showing up in a deleted scene.
