With 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse, Fox attempted to deliver a Marvel Studios-style blockbuster, and the results...weren't great. The movie was a critical bomb and underperformed at the box office, and the studio later decided to put the franchise in the hands of Simon Kinberg, a disastrous decision which resulted in the worst-reviewed X-Men movie ever released: Dark Phoenix.
During a recent interview with Slash Film, The New Mutants director Josh Boone explained why the reaction to X-Men: Apocalypse led to his movie undergoing some major changes.
As well as deciding it should be standalone in nature, Fox also wanted to move away from the past.
"They really did want it to be different than other stuff," Boone explains. "They really pushed us to keep it separate from X-Men stuff, even though it’s set in the X-Men universe. We had early drafts that were supposed to be in the same timeline as [X-Men:] Apocalypse, so it was originally going to be set in the ’80s. Originally, Professor X and Storm were in it, and Storm very much played the Alice Braga role."
"Over the course of months, a new studio head came in, they said they didn’t want any X-Men movies to take place in the past anymore, as if that was the reason that Apocalypse was bad. [laughs] So we were put in the position where we kind of rewrote it to be set now in a nebulous [point in time], because nobody knew how the movies had turned out. Dark Phoenix wasn’t out yet. Yeah, it’s there – they talk about Professor X and those things, but it doesn’t have cameos from anyone or anything like that."
That confirms references to the wider X-Men Universe (which is no more), but also that we can forget about any familiar faces showing up. It's interesting that Storm was going to take the place of Alice Braga's Dr. Cecilia Reyes, as it's widely believed that character is The New Mutants' lead villain.
It's also strange that Fox wanted to move away from certain time periods, as Dark Phoenix took place in the 1990s; however, given how it barely referenced that decade, it too was somewhat "in a nebulous [point in time]."
The New Mutants is now a standalone movie, though it is hard not to wonder what an earlier version of the movie - set in the 1980s - would have looked like.