If you miss the days when Fox was running the X-Men movies, then I have exceedingly bad news for you. Had the franchise not been in such jeopardy, and The New Mutants delayed for so long, you could have seen Mad Men and Baby Driver star Jon Hamm wearing what is arguably the most preposterous cape in the entirety of the Marvel comics multiverse.
Even if you were quite done with Fox’s movies, however, it would have been pretty cool to see the actor in the role of the brilliant, Victorian-era, mutant-obsessed geneticist in a cameo at the end of The New Mutants, which starred Anna Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Blu Hunt, and more. Josh Boone, director of the film, spoke to Hamm about making an appearance. In a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Hamm said, “I remember having a conversation with people: I’m a huge comic book fan, especially of the X-Men and the New Mutants, so I was excited to be considered. But these conversations happen and then life intervenes.”
Interventions, for example, such as the massive amount of reshoots that prevented The New Mutants from premiering in 2018 as intended, followed by more delays caused by the Disney acquisition of 20th Century Fox, which plunged the decidedly non-MCU movie into the murky waters of Marvel Studios’ core films. The New Mutants finally came out on March 12, 2020, solely on HBO Max, just before the pandemic hit America in earnest.
Given the latter installments of Fox’s X-Men movie franchise wasted some truly great actors with truly terrible villain roles — Apocalypse’s Oscar Isaac and Dark Phoenix’s Jessica Chastain come immediately to mind — it’s arguably for the best we never got to see how poorly a new film would treat Hamm, as well as the character of Mr. Sinister. But perhaps the biggest crime here is that Hamm has confirmed there’s no footage of him running around in the villain’s magnificent, incomprehensible cape.
Your move, Marvel.