The New Mutants Director is Ready to Return to Theaters

Not only are movie theaters around the country finally starting to open up but they’re doing so with one of the longest delayed movies, ever. It’s no Avatar sequel in terms of the wait but The New Mutants released its first trailer in 2017 and has been plagued with delays due to company mergers, global pandemics, and other bizarre circumstances since it completed production years ago. Now, on August 28, the film is finally going to play on big screens and director Josh Boone is more than ready to get back into movie theaters himself — though he has seen his Mutants movie more than enough times through years of editing so he might be watching something else.

“I’m gonna go see Tenet Like a couple of times, for sure,” Boone tells ComicBook.com. “Man, I if never see this movie! No, I’m kidding. I’m sure I’ll see [The New Mutants] at some point, but it’s like, ‘No, I’m good I’ve seen it enough for now!’”

The director jokes about being a bit exhausted by so many years of The New Mutants but he clearly displays every bit of enthusiasm and excitement when he dives into the story, cast, and other details.

“There’s so few comic book movies that don’t star adults,” Bonne points out. “It’s like almost all of them star Robert Downey Jr. Chris Hemsworth or Mark Ruffalo or whoever. And it’s like, I love all those movies, but it’s like, there was a time in movies where like youth movies and movies about teenagers and coming of age movies would come out in a movie theater. And it’s like, we sort of tried to smuggle that into this movie to try to make kind of an old style John Hughes movie, but inside a horror movie and all of that.”

The New Mutants released its first few minutes online during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con’s at home version of the pop culture gathering and the horror vibes clearly set the film apart from most other comic book titles.

“Another big difference I’d say is like, you know, we shot in all real locations,” Boone points out. “There’s not a lot of big set builds in it. So it looks a lot different from other superhero movies. It’s a lot more grounded. It’s character driven and performance driven in a way that some of these other ones are not as much. And I guess it is dark. They’ll have traumas that they’re dealing with from their past and things like that that are certainly darker than your typical Marvel movie.”

While some elements of The New Mutants may resemble or reference several comic book titles or other films in the X-Men franchise’s canon, Boone is very adamant about which title is directly being adapted. He went all in on bring the Demon Bear story to the big screen.

“It deals with all of our New Mutants origin stories, but it’s really a retelling of the Demon Bear story in this new location that, you know, basically stealing the location from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, gave us a location in a way to tell the story that was contained enough that we could do it on the budget that we needed to do it for,” Boone explains. “So putting those two things together sort of gave us a way to play with that stuff, if that makes sense. We shot in a real 150 year old hospital. A psychiatric hospital that like terrible things had happened there. So it’s like, it had a bit of an aura and a bit of a tone to it. They felt different than other things when we would watch it. So yeah, I don’t know, it’s interesting. I never worried too much about when it came out. Cause I don’t feel like there’s been another movie quite like it.”

Are you excited to get back into movie theaters? Are you comfortable heading out to watch in a theater? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Twitter and Instagam.

The New Mutants hits theaters where theaters are open on August 28. Tickets are on sale now.