Don't look now, but FOX is trying to reinvent how it approaches the superhero genre with a few of its spinoff properties. Logan already impressed critics and audiences by allowing James Mangold to send Hugh Jackman off in a downbeat neo-Western. Deadpool poured its filthy heart into an R-rated, violent package. And we have been hearing that Josh Boone's New Mutants would be a teen-horror experiment, though now we know more about the actual plot. 20th Century Fox CEO Stacey Snider recently revealed:
New Mutants is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It's like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they're dangerous. The only solution is to put them in a Breakfast Club detention/Cuckoo's Nest institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it's strange and combustible inside. The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven't seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like The Shining than 'we're teenagers let's save the world.'
We have heard the term "Stephen King meets John Hughes" when it comes to the type of movie that Josh Boone (The Fault In Our Stars) is setting out to make with New Mutants, which kicks off an exciting year for FOX in 2018. But Stacey Snider's comments to Variety pull back a little more of the curtain on this intriguing superhero property and better explain how it's going to stand apart from the ongoing X-Men saga.
The Shining? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Those are completely unexpected touchstone properties to reference when making a teenage superhero movie. If anything, they put New Mutants on a line with Legion, and if you watched FX's program, you know how different its approach to the genre turned out to be.
The New Mutants, for those who might not be familiar with this team, were introduced in their own comic book back in 1982. They were a younger spinoff team to the X-Men, and constantly wrestled with an inability to control their powers, the immature counterpart to the veteran, savvy X-Men team. The roster of the team has changed numerous times over the years, but for the movie, we know that we will be getting Cannonball (Charlie Heaton), Magik (Anya Taylor-Joy), Mirage (Blu Hunt), Wolfsbane (Maisie Williams) and Sunspot (Henry Zaga).
But now, thanks to Stacey Snider's comments, we're envisioning a self-contained haunted house thriller that's set in an institute (a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) that still plays off of the teenage-relationship dramas that were made popular by John Hughes' classics. Will that be enough to help New Mutants stand apart from the rest of the Upcoming X-Men movies? We will find out when New Mutants finally opens in theaters on April 13, 2018.
