Josh Boone’s The New Mutants film has followed a number of different paths on its way to finally playing for fans of the X-Men spinoff team. Beyond casting and production, the movie has had to go through multiple steps to get its audience’s attention, and then maintain it while they waited for the film to be released, properly. As the cast took the “stage” at San Diego Comic-Con@Home on Thursday, Boone and his actors sat down with CinemaBlend for an exclusive conversation about all things New Mutants.
The topic eventually circled around to the Director’s Cut of The New Mutants, and whether the movie had to shed scenes during its lengthy post-production process. Maybe it’s because my mind was swirling with the idea of a David Ayer cut of Suicide Squad, or the infamous Snyder Cut of Justice League, but I wondered if there will be an alternate cut of New Mutants waiting for fans when it reaches DVD and Blu-ray. I asked New Mutants director Josh Boone, and he told me:
You know, it's funny. I put together a selection of deleted scenes that were things that just didn't fit, tonally, with what we were doing, but are fun character moments. But no, I mean, really what you see is the director's cut. It's maybe 15 to 20 percent different than it was when I cut it initially, because I had time to go back and look at it after a year while the merger was going on. So yeah, I'm just really happy with how it turned out, and I'm really happy people get to finally see it.
That makes sense. One of the perks of The New Mutants being delayed as many times as it has been is that director Josh Boone has been given time to work on it, and make it the best possible version. That doesn’t always mean rewrites and reshoots. Sometimes it can just mean getting time away from the movie – in this case, a year where Boone didn’t have to watch it, but then returned with fresh eyes.
We also talked about how the trailers for New Mutants improved, from a special effects perspective. We’d gradually see more of the mutant team’s powers in action, especially when it came to Magik’s soulsword, and a peek into her home world of Limbo. I asked Boone if the effects will also be improved because of the amount of extra time the movie got in post, and he explained:
I don't know if they're better. Our visual effects supervisor, Olivier [Dumont], is so wonderful. It's just, that was sort of what was left unfinished when the merger happened. So a lot of the work that was done in the past year has been getting all those visual effects done. And when the cast saw [the movie], it was really the first time they'd ever seen the [Demon] Bear. And it had been years, you know? So to finally see the bear, I think, was gratifying. To be like, ‘Oh, there really is going to be a giant bear, and it is great.’
The Demon Bear is a villain lifted right off the pages of the early issues of the Marvel comic The New Mutants. It’s a terrorizing manifestation conjured by Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt), and it will take the full power of the New Mutants team to bring this threat down.
The New Mutants stars Hunt, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Anya Taylor-Joy, Alice Braga and Henry Zaga. The movie is due to hit theaters (if they are open) on August 28.
