“Who knows when the fuck it’s gonna come out?”
That’s a quotefromMaisie Williams, theNew Mutantsstar who has no idea whenTheNew Mutantsis going to hit theaters… presuming 20th Century Fox’s long-delayedX-Menspinoff is still slated for a theatrical release. Williams' co-stars,Anya Taylor-JoyandCharlie Heaton, are in the dark too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if directorJosh Booneis as well. That’s because the project has been in limbo since last summer, when the Disney-Fox merger became all but a sure thing, andNew Mutantswas destined to become someone else’s problem. That’s how Fox has treated it, and that’s what it seems to have become for Disney, which has five options from what I can tell.
Option 1:ReleaseNew Mutants, as is, into theaters, and hope for the best. I totally understand why Disney may not want to sink a ton of marketing dollars into this film, since they didn’t make it and have no real creative attachment to the film. Having said that,New Mutantswasn’t terribly expensive, so Disney wouldn’t necessarily have to do that to recoup costs. They could simply cut their losses and dump it over Labor Day weekend, one of the slowest weekends at the box office, to be sure, but one that would nonetheless fulfill certain contractual obligations regarding a theatrical release. See, I’m told a streaming release would require Boone and the cast to amend their contracts and sign off on a new deal, and to my knowledge, that option has not been presented to any of them… at least not yet, anyway. However, I imagine they’d all be happy to amend their deals to accommodate a streaming release, if only to finally put the project behind them and move on with the rest of their careers.
Option 4:Don’t releaseNew Mutantsat all. Ever. This possibility seems very unlikely to me. If the Disney-Fox merger never happened, I’d say this would be impossible. There’sno wayFox would just eat tens of millions of dollars. But Disney? Well, they actually could… and who knows, they actually might! Maybe they just want to wipe theX-Menslate clean for Kevin Feige afterDark Phoenixhits theaters in June. But I doubt it. It’s just not a good look in terms of talent relations. Hundreds and hundreds of people worked onNew Mutantsand that work deserves to be seen. It’s not like the film is supposed to be some uber-embarrassment. Boone’s first cut scored higher with test audiences than the first cut ofDark Phoenixdid. It’s just thatDark Phoenix, with its mega-budget and A-list stars, was a higher priority for Fox, and so the studio’s resources were spent fixing that summer blockbuster rather than the lower-budget genre film full of young stars. I’d give this option better odds if Fox hadn’t releasedthat first (and only) trailerback in October 2017. If that had never been released, I could see Disney sweepingNew Mutantsunder the rug and forgetting it ever existed, but a trailer is a promise of sorts to the audience, and promises are meant to be kept, even if they’re hard.
Like everyone mentioned by name in this story, we’ll have to wait and see what happens toNew Mutants. Boone had set out to make an R-rated horror movie, only to be instructed to turnNew Mutantsa PG-13 YA movie, and when he delivered on that front, Fox executives changed their minds and wanted him to make the film “scarier” after seeingItmake a killing at the box office despite its R-rating. It just sounds like no one was really on the same page throughout this production, which is a shame, because this is one comic book property that really stood out and piqued my interest. I have no choice but to keep the faith here and root forDark Phoenixto work, which just might be enough to goose Disney to saveNew Mutants. The studiowound up seeing the lightwith theJames Gunn-Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3situation. Let’s hope they’re willing to do the right thing here, because to throwNew Mutantson the scrapheap of history would be an act of villainy worthy of Magneto himself.
