‘New Mutants’ Could Begin A Trilogy Of X-Men Horror Movies

The first teaser for The New Mutants confirmed a shocking new direction for the X-Men movies, and the director teased that there’s more to come.

While speaking with IGN about the horror-flavored mutant movie, Josh Boone revealed the film’s influences and how they intend to make two more movies after The New Mutants.

“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,” said Boone. “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.”

Boone added that the recent success of movies like Logan and Deadpool emboldened them to take their movie into a wildly different direction.

“Our take was just go examine the horror genre through comic book movies and make each one its own distinct sort of horror film,” Boone said. “Drawing from the big events that we love in the comics.”

Boone promised more New Mutants characters for future movies and revealed it would tie into the X-Men movie universe, though he wouldn’t say how closely.

Though he refused to call Demon Bear the villain in the movie, Boone revealed The New Mutants is heavily influenced by that particular storyline — and some other classic films.

“Our whole pitch for this series was based on Bill Sienkiewicz run with Chris Claremont [The New Mutants vol. 1 #18–31, 35–38], so it’s very much when New Mutants became dark and surreal and more horror driven,” Boone said. “We were incredibly inspired by the Demon Bear story which is probably the best, well-known New Mutants story. We also drew on movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Stephen King stuff, and even Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

“Darabont wrote that back in the day and that was very inspiring to us. 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. 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.”

The teaser contained a shot paying homage to Freddy Krueger poking through the wall which Boone revealed was done with practical effects, which will be the standard for a majority of the movie.

The New Mutants hits theaters April 13, 2018.