On Friday – the 13th, which felt like an appropriate date – the first trailer for X-Men spin-off The New Mutants landed in all its chilling glory. If you haven't seen it, it's lurking at the bottom of the page. And talking about his film, co-writer/director Josh Boone has been outlining his plans for the future.
The new movie introduces a group of young mutants (including Maisie Williams' Rahne, Anya Taylor-Joy's Illyana and Charlie Heaton's Sam) who are trapped in a terrifying facility straight out of a horror movie. It's a very different tactic for an X-Movie, and that's by design.
"Fox made Deadpool and Logan and they were sort of so tonally different they felt embolden to let us go make it different, and make have its own distinct tone and identity," Boone tells IGN UK. "I think of the mainline X-Men movies more as grand operative science-fiction films. This is much more of a performance-driven horror film."
He was inspired by Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Claremont's work on the comics, which brought a much darker tone to the stories, along with movies such as One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and A Nightmare On Elm Street. "If we'd had just done New Mutants the comic, it would've been very much set-up like an X-Men movie in the mansion with Professor X and all that," explains Boone. "So we really wanted to do something different. So kind of what we brought to Sienkiewicz and Claremont's take on New Mutants was this idea they're all in a psych-hole for mutants."
And if The New Mutants becomes a success, Boone already has a plan for more. "We brought it to Fox as a trilogy of films, really all based on that long run by Sienkiewicz, and kind of incorporates some stuff from later issues in the '80s," he says. "These are all going to be horror movies, and they're all be their own distinct kind of horror movies. This is certainly the ‘rubber-reality’ supernatural horror movie. The next one will be a completely different kind of horror movie. Our take was just go examine the horror genre through comic book movies and make each one its own distinct sort of horror film. Drawing from the big events that we love in the comics." For more from the writer/director, head to IGN UK's site.
The New Mutants screams into UK cinemas on 13th April – yep, another Friday the 13th...
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