New Mutants Screenplay To Get a Polish From The Fault In Our Stars Screenwriters

The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone has apparently turned to his screenwriters from that film to help finalize the screenplay for his planned FOX/Marvel super-team film The New Mutants.

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the writing team behind the hit YA adaptations The Fault in Our Stars and The Spectacular Now, are "working on" the script, according to THR. The fact that Boone has been working on one for some time likely indicates that either the studio wanted his version cleaned up, or that he's happy with the big picture now and wanted to call in trusted writers to fine-tune it.

The film is expected to spin out of the long-running X-Men franchise, and is produced by Simon Kinberg, who works on those films and TV projects. It's one of a number of projects aimed at keeping the brand vital for Fox and Marvel in spite of the loss of longtime leading man Hugh Jackman, who recently wrapped production on his final Wolverine film.

The movie is expected to center on a number of previously-unknown X-Men characters like Magik, Sunspot, and Wolfsbane. At the same time, the X-Men universe is expanding to television with Legion in the coming season, and of course Deadpool is getting the inevitable sequel after blowing the doors off the February box office earlier this year.

Back in May, thelineup started to gel in the minds of fans when

Boone posted a series of artwork to his Instagram page featuring several fan favorite members of the original New Mutants roster. These characters include Magik, Wolfsbane, Mirage, Cannonball, and Sunspot. Boone followed that up with a group shot of all five characters and finished with an image of the shapeshifting Warlock as an airplane.

Four out of the six characters were members of the original team and are some of the group's most iconic members. The other two are the catalysts for some of the most memorable classic New Mutants stories. For Warlock, that's the confict with his alien race, the Phalanx, and father, Magus. For Magik, it's the demon invasion from the Limbo dimension that culminated in the Inferno crossover. There's also the fact that she is Illyana Rasputin, the sister of the X-Men's Colossus, making for a nice tie into the core film franchise.

Producer Simon Kinberg has hinted that they were considering casting Magik. A separate report suggested that 20th Century Fox had actually already cast Magik and Wolfsbane, and added X-Men: Apocalypse's Alexandra Shipp as Storm, but Fox has denied the report has any credibility.

Besides their YA adaptations and other teen-centric material, Neustadter and Weber recently wrote the screenplay for The Masterpiece, a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction movie about the making of Tommy Wiseau's notoriously awful film The Room. Spider-Man's James Franco directed and stars in the film.