Warning: This post might be about New Mutants, but it contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Avengers: Endgame.
With the news of several years worth of Disney and Fox release dates revealed, one movie that got shuffled around once again was The New Mutants. Based on the popular X-Men spin-off comic of the ’80s, this film has become a victim of the Disney/Fox merger. Director Josh Boone shot the film in the fall of 2017. Fox gave it an April 13, 2018 release. Then delays pushed it to February 22, 2019, before postponing again to August 2, 2019.
Now, it’s set for April of 2020, now a Disney-controlled enterprise. What if the delay is not a sign of poor quality, but instead of Disney re-tooling the film to introduce the concept of mutants into the MCU? Let’s look at the evidence.
While a movie getting shuffled around this much on a release schedule usually indicates a disaster behind-the-scenes, that might not actually be the case here. It might simply be the victim of Disney not knowing what to do with an X-Men spin-off film now that the regular X-universe seems to be coming to a close with Dark Phoenix. And when a movie is usually bad and a studio knows it, they don’t tend to push that movie to prime release real estate, like the month of April. April is where Marvel releases enormous movies, like Infinity War and Endgame.
And ever since 2017, Marvel Studios has been on three movies a year schedule. Next year, there are only two unnamed MCU movies (which are probably Black Widow and Eternals). But what if New Mutants is secretly the third?
It’s possible Avengers: Endgame stealth-introduced the mutant phenomenon into the MCU. When either Hulk or Iron Man snapped their fingers, there’s no telling how many “wishes” they made. When one holds all the Infinity Stones, they are granted the powers of a god, however briefly. What if Tony or Bruce made an innocent wish, something akin to “I wish for humanity to finally evolve to a better place?” Maybe they didn’t mean for the mutant phenomenon to happen, but the Stones might translate those thoughts very literally. And we now might have groups of evolved humans, a.k.a. mutants, popping up all over the world. Another possibility is that the Scarlet Witch could bring mutants into the MCU, as there is plenty to suggest she could be the catalyst for something like this.
Although the New Mutants characters in the comics were originally yet another class of young students at Xavier’s School for the Gifted, the movie seems go another route. The plot synopsis as well as the trailer indicate a story where these young mutants go to a private facility for study. They must band together to get out. Unless Charles Xavier shot some kind of post-credits tease, there is no major component to the existing X-Men lore we already know, or probably not something that couldn’t be excised out.
So why not introduce these kids as the first of a new young breed of mutants emerging in the world? Even the title itself could indicate that these aren’t just mutants new to the X-Men franchise, but now new to the entire MCU. Suddenly, that title has a whole new meaning. With a cast featuring Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones and Charlie Heaton from Stranger Things as main characters, there’s an obvious pull with several different fanbases already. If the movie is good, then maybe Disney should really consider making New Mutants the beginning of Marvel Studios’ own X-Men era, instead of just a footnote at the end of the old one.
Images: Twentieth Century Fox