Wait, something you read about on the internet was wrong? Say it ain’t so!
For years, fans have been waiting to see what director Josh Boone was going to do with the Marvel mutant film The New Mutants. The first trailer came out in 2017 and almost immediately, the film suffered multiple setbacks. Those setbacks were long rumoured to be the result of massive reshoots. We previously detailed the whole thing here. Well, The New Mutants is now actually being released in a few short weeks and, for the first time, Boone has come out and publically told the story.
“Everybody said we did reshoots! We’ve never done reshoots,” Boone told Entertainment Weekly. “And I’ll tell you this: if there hadn’t been a merger, I’m sure we would’ve done reshoots the same way every movie does pickups. We didn’t even do that because by the time the merger was done and everything was settled, everybody’s older.”
Ah, that pesky merger. Turns out, the release of New Mutants was delayed not because of problems, but because of Disney buying Fox, the company that made it. So, Boone says, for almost a year, no one from either studio got in touch with him about it. In that time, he went off and prepped The Stand as rumours were swirling about the movie he had not yet finished. “When [Disney] called me right before I went to go make The Stand and said, “˜Would you come finish the movie?’ I said, “˜I would f”in’ love to come finish the movie!’,” Boone said.
What he went back to was a film with unfinished visual effects, which is why the first trailer was underwhelming. Since then, many more effects have been added, such as the mystical abilities of Illyana (Anya Taylor-Joy) as well as her dragon companion Lockheed (famous friend to Kitty Pryde). If anything, while The New Mutants didn’t do any reshoots, Boone does think the year or so he didn’t work on the movie could have only helped it.
“In the editing, we were probably 75 per cent done,” Boone said. “We came back and finished it up. It took a couple months, and it was nice to be able to come back. Knate [Lee], my co-writer, and I, we hadn’t seen it in a year. We did a bunch of things here and there that we hadn’t thought about or noticed a year before.”
And the results will finally, for real, be in theatres on April 9.