To say that Josh Boone’s New Mutants X-Men spinoff movie has been plagued by production woes is something of an understatement. Some new information about the delayed project doesn’t help.
First, the movie’s release date was delayed by a full 10 months in order to ensure it wouldn’t compete with Deadpool 2. It was then delayed again in order to allow for reshoots and to make space for Dark Phoenix on Fox’s release schedule. And all of this was happening while Fox was in the process of selling the X-Men film rights back to Disney and Marvel studios, a move that cast the entire established X-Men franchise’s future into question.
Most recently, Fox still planned for The New Mutants to hit theatres in August, but now that the deal with Disney’s finally gone through, questions as to whether the movie’s ever actually coming out have begun to crop up once again—and even the actors involved apparently have no idea what the answer is. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Game of Thrones actress Maisie Williams described bumping into Charlie Heaton (who plays Cannonball in the film) and discussing how neither of them know what’s going on with The New Mutants, adding that none of the planned reshoots have taken place yet:
“Who knows when the fuck [The New Mutants is] gonna come out? Hopefully this interview will make everyone hurry up a little bit!”
Williams noted that she hopes to have the chance to appear alongside her Game of Thrones co-star Sophie Turner in an X-Men movie as their respective mutant characters, but the likelihood of that ever happening appears to be increasingly slim. While it’d been previously reported that Marvel still planned to release Fox’s projects that were either completed or in production, it’s possible that The New Mutants — which also stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Henry Zaga, Blu Hunt, and Alice Braga — has so much left to finish that the studio may not feel the desire to do so.
Of course, anything’s possible, but short of a contractual obligation to wrap up The New Mutants and bring it to theatres, there’s a chance that the film — like the long-gestating Kitty Pryde and Gambit — might not ever see the light of day. We’ve reached out to the studio to see if there’s any official status update on The New Mutants, and will update this post should we hear back.