X-Men Spinoff ‘The New Mutants’ Could Get R Rating

Horror-tinged X-Men spinoff movie The New Mutants maybe even darker than expected.

Speaking to Collider, producer Hutch Parker revealed that the film could end up with an R rating.

“It’s the kind of movie that could go R, or it could be a hard PG-13,” Parker said. “As I was saying before in terms of subgenres or the genre, it is obviously teased as a horror film, and most horror films these days are R-rated, but it stars a very young cast, so we’ll see. It really is what the movie wants to be. The studio is open to either rating…Traditionally, superhero movies are PG-13 other than Logan and the Deadpool movies, and generally, horror films are R-rated, so we’ll see where this one falls. It is a very scary, edgy movie.”

Previously, Parker and Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg have explained why the core X-Men film series hasn’t gone the R-rated route.

“There really hasn’t, mostly because the depth and the complexity of the characters, there’s been nothing we haven’t been able to tackle within a PG-13,” Parker said. “Logan was driven by wanting to do something different with the nature of his condition, with the way in which we expressed and represented the violence, with the accumulation of that in a life. So there were very specific ideas that Jim wanted to explore that required an R. In this case, we would and could have had the conversation, but the material didn’t really warrant it in that same way and I think certainly the way which [Kinberg’s] explored the character-based issues of Dark Phoenix I’d say is darker and in many ways much more intense without necessarily requiring R-rating.”

Kinberg added, “I think when you look at Dark Knight, that was a PG-13 movie and that tackled some really mature subject matter and was edgier and darker and more intense than previous movies in the genre had been, but that was still a PG-13. So like I’ve said, there was no need for extra swear words. The level of violence in this is intense for PG-13 movie but is still within the bounds of that.”

Would you like to see The New Mutants get an R rating? Let us know in the comment!

The New Mutants opens August 2, 2019

Other upcoming X-Men movies include the PG-13 re-release of Deadpool 2 on December 21st, Dark Phoenix on June 7, 2019, and Gambit in March 2020.