Entertainment Weekly recently caught up with
The New Mutants director Josh Boone, and the filmmaker confirms that before the Disney/Fox merger, his hope was that this would be the first chapter in a trilogy. There have, of course, been rumblings of some sort of Mister Sinister appearance for a while now, but it turns out Boone's plan was actually a lot different.
In a post-credits scene which was never actually shot, Antonio Banderas would have made an appearance as Emmanuel da Costa, the father of Henry Zaga's Roberto. Just like in the comic books, he was set to be a member of the villainous Hellfire Club, and the sequel would have dealt with Sunspot returning to Brazil to reunite with his archaeologist mother, whom Emmanuel is trying to kill.
"We always intended to do New Mutants: Brazil as the second movie," Boone says. "It was intentional that we didn’t shoot it. We had always planned to have a tag at the end of the movie that introduced the villain for the next movie. We even had an actor cast, but because of the merger and because Marvel owns X-Men now and is going to do their own thing, there was no reason to go shoot it." That's not exactly the Mister Sinister tease fans expected or were hoping for!
Still, it definitely had the potential to be cool, and there was lots to look forward to in the sequel.
"Karma was always going to be the villain in the second movie that would be absorbed into the group by the end," Boone explains. "We had always wanted to bring Karma and Warlock into the second one when we couldn’t do it in the first one. For us, we wanted that initial core team [for the first movie]. We just couldn’t swap out Illyana. We felt like there was no reason to do [the movie] if we couldn’t bring that character to life in the first one."
"In our heart of hearts, we hope [The New Mutants] makes a bunch of money so that we can go make the second one," the filmmaker admits while acknowledging that it's unlikely.
"We’re all just bummed at everything that happened. Just the merger and everything else. It had nothing to do with us personally and had an impact on every single movie at Fox at the time."
It definitely sounds like Boone had some cool ideas for the franchise moving forward, but the chances of them ever coming to fruition are slim (especially with a pretty dismal predicted opening weekend). With any luck, though,
The New Mutants will be a better send-off for the
X-Men franchise than
Dark Phoenix was!
What do you guys think?