The New Mutants director Josh Boone confirms there have been no discussions about retconning the horror-skewing X-Men spinoff into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where new mutants will make their debut when rebooted under Kevin Feige. The X-Verse, launched with 2000’s X-Men and inherited by Disney after it acquired Fox in a $71.3 billion sale, came to a close with the release of last summer’s Dark Phoenix and now New Mutants taking place on the fringes of the wider X-Men world. With the long-delayed New Mutants now in theaters, Boone says there were zero talks about incorporating the spinoff into the currently mutant-less MCU:
“No, none at all,” Boone told Den of Geek when asked if there were creative talks with Feige. “I just really finished the process we’d already gotten kind of 70% of the way through before the merger happened. It was nice to have the retrospect of the year where I was off working on The Stand and doing other things to come back and look at it, because we sat there and did other little things here and there.”
Videos by ComicBook.com
Originally scheduled to release in 2018 before being delayed to early and then late 2019 by Fox, and again twice delayed once ownership of the film switched to Disney, Boone says New Mutants is all Fox.
“I love Marvel movies, but we were a Fox Marvel movie. So it’s like as far as what that means or what it means to them, I don’t have any idea,” he said. “We just sort of made the movie we wanted to make at Fox, and we were inherited by Disney. The cast and I would certainly go make another one in a second if we could, and I’d love to see these characters at least carried on in some way because I don’t think anybody’s got a better young cast.”
That cast of teenaged mutants — Danielle “Dani” Moonstar (Blu Hunt), Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams), Illyana Rasputin (Anna Taylor Joy), Roberto “Bobby” da Costa (Henry Zaga), and Samuel “Sam” Guthrie (Charlie Heaton) — are characters who might not fit into Feige and Disney’s universe, home to superheroes like Black Panther and Captain Marvel.
In a separate interview with Screen Rant, where Heaton said New Mutants “really feels so in its own world,” Boone added, “It would be really weird in this movie if Wolverine showed up. They’re sort of in their own tonal space, and the aesthetic space is sort of its own thing.”
In 2019, shortly after Disney completed its purchase of Fox, Feige told io9 “it will be a very long time” before Marvel Studios reboots X-Men.
The New Mutants is now playing in theaters.
