THE NEW MUTANTS Director Josh Boone Explains How X-MEN: APOCALYPSE & The Merger Changed His Movie - EXCLUSIVE

A lot has been said over the past three years about what happened - and often didn't happen - with 20th Century Fox's final X-Men entry, The New Mutants, and with the film finally hitting theaters tomorrow, we were recently granted an exclusive opportunity to chat with director Josh Boone about separating the fact from fiction regarding his film. 

While it was always expected to explore a different subsection of the X-Men universe, Boone admits that the poor critical reception and subsequent box office disappointment of X-Men: Apocalypse, which was originally billed as a massive event film, pushed Fox into forcing him to completely rewrite his initial draft of The New Mutants. 

After confirming that, "We never had any reshoots," he explains, "At the beginning of the process, when we wrote the first few drafts, we were really going to be set in the Apocalypse X-Men era, so we started writing as if Apocalypse had happened right before our movie happened. So, we always had Professor X in a very limited capacity to sort of get you into the movie and get you out of the movie and we had Storm there as the sort of Alice Braga character. She was basically who Cecilia Reyes became later.

Then, Apocalypse opened to… not great reviews and the studio wanted to basically disentangle us from that franchise and asked that no more X-Men movies be set in the past. I was like “Yo, that’s not why Apocalypse was bad.” *laughs* I mean, Days of Future Past was set in the ‘60s and it was fantastic, it was so great.

They removed us from that, but it was also the biggest favor they could have done because we still are peripherally X-Men, we have X-Men things in our movie so you know that you’re in that universe, but we didn’t have to be attached to their timeline or everything that was going on in there. So, all of the things that you read about are things that sort of happened during the development process of the story. Like Warlock being in it, but when he was removed, it sort of became the movie it became."

Due to the lengthy process behind the Disney/Fox merger, the film went through an unexpected dark period where Boone had to leave it unfinished and was unsure of what was going to happen or when it was going to be released. However, he did ultimately get the movie back on track post-merger, and it sounds like Disney did request that a few changes be made that would completely remove all connections to the X-Men (possibly to tie off loose ends before an eventual Marvel Studios reboot?). 

"We just tried to make sure that all the things that sort of connected it events in the other X-Men movies were out, things that would make it seem like there would be another X-Men movie after this. It was more cleaning up the mess of the merger and the impact it had on us. I mean it had a similar impact on Dark Phoenix because that was literally supposed to be two movies, and the reshoots on that, I’m sure were done to make it into one film.

So, we had to deal with things like that on a much more limited level where it was just trimming out a few little things here and there. It’s still the movie that we shot and I was able to finish it and get the sound design and all of the visual effects done."

Stay tuned for more exclusive The New Mutants coverage!

20th Century Fox in association with Marvel Entertainment presents “The New Mutants,” an original horror thriller set in an isolated hospital where a group of young mutants is being held for psychiatric monitoring. When strange occurrences begin to take place, both their new mutant abilities and their friendships will be tested as they battle to try and make it out alive.