However, according to sources familiar with
New Mutants’ production
, Boone and his co-writer, Knate Lee, were reluctant or outright unwilling to implement such script changes requested by the studio, requiring round after round of rewrites and one intervention-like roundtable read just before filming. Once principal photography was finished,
Fox was so displeased with the initial cut the studio discussed throwing the entire movie out to “start over” with a total reshoot. The controversial finished product —
a PG-13 dark fantasy pulsed with “jump scares” if not outright horror or gore — then fell victim to the studio merger and the ensuing uncertainty over “What now constitutes a Disney film?” Answer: not this.
“It was understood this was going to be X-Men at a price,” says a source with knowledge of
New Mutants’ development, who, like several people quoted here, spoke to Vulture on condition of anonymity citing ongoing business sensitivities.
Trouble was, Lee and Boone’s initial 2015 screenplay drafts failed to deliver the kind of vividly drawn teen drama the filmmaker had pitched to the studio. Moreover, the script’s crude humor needed toning down. “Josh was sending around posters where [the
New Mutants] characters are put into the
Breakfast Club poster.
The Legend of Billie Jean was another movie he was always bringing up,” says another source with knowledge of the production. “Punk-rock-y, rebellious teens are already baked into the X-Men, but here, one of the characters was a misogynist and graffiti-ing his penis on stuff. There were head scratchers. Like,
That’s not going to work.”
Further, some outside observers felt Boone and Lee’s initial script violated viewers’ expectations for beloved X-Men characters such as Storm, a powerful mutant capable of psychically controlling the weather, who turned up as a kind of prison warden in early versions of
Mutants.
“She was their sadistic jailer,” says one source. “It felt like the kids were being tortured. If the X-Men are holding [the young mutants] t
here, it can’t feel different from the mental furniture that audiences bring into the theater knowing that the X-Men are good guys. Storm like that made no sense.” (A spokesperson for Disney said Boone was unavailable to speak with Vulture for this article.)
The studio eventually brought in outside help, enlisting
Fault in Our Stars writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
to give an uncredited punch-up to the characters.
But according to sources who spoke to Vulture, the director remained at a creative “impasse” with Kinberg.
The cycle went like this: New versions of the script would come in, then Boone would revise them by replacing or eliminating some of the work that had been added.
By the winter of 2016, however, Fox officially got cold feet about the direction in which New Mutants was heading. Studio chairperson–chief executive Stacey Snider personally ordered the course correction. “Stacey didn’t want to do anymore
Breakfast Club parts. It had to be horror. Straight horror,” a source tells Vulture. Another source adds, “They had zero faith the horror-[teen movie]-hybrid version would work in the marketplace.”
A roundup of uncredited screenwriters were again hauled in, this time to dial up Mutants’ scares. But according to people close to Mutants, Boone continued to reject script changes as they came in: “Josh and Knate clarified the horror. Then [the Fox executives] bring in another outside writer. And then Josh went back again. There was this pattern where it would be Josh, then someone. Then Josh, then someone. Then Josh. That went back and forth.”
The conflict came to a head in 2017, just before cameras were set to roll. Fox organized a roundtable script reading in New York to compel Boone to come around to their suggested “notes” to improve the film.
In addition to Boone, Lee, and Young, the studio assembled six or seven of the uncredited writers who had been working on New Mutants up until that point as well as Scott Frank, a top-tier screenwriter behind Logan and 2013’s The Wolverine, who has functioned as a kind of secret X-Men whisperer, advising on many of the franchise’s films. According to a Vulture insider, the collected group delivered a roundelay of critiques, pointing out lapses in logic, deficits of humor, and underdeveloped characters. “Josh pushed back a little,” a source says. “People would be like, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ And Josh would try to explain it. Enthusiasm is not an explanation.”
At this point, according to three sources with knowledge of the project, Fox was hardly sanguine about New Mutants’ commerciality. Even with the world-beating success of the 2017 Stephen King horror adaptation
It — which took in $700.4 million worldwide against a $35 million production budget — held up as a comparable work, significant doubt lingered about whether
Mutants’ scary-meets-super tone would find an audience.
In postproduction, a studio executive noted that a total do-over would not necessarily be a financial wipeout given the film’s relatively bargain budget. “You could throw the movie out, start over, and it would still be the least expensive X-Men movie so far,” the sources recall a high-ranking Fox executive claiming.
Yet New Mutants went ahead as is. Once Disney inherited the project in earnest last year, marketers puzzled over where such a dark-fantasy film featuring depictions of madness and a Native American massacre would fit into the Mouse House’s family-friendly corporate ethos. A release scheme on either Hulu or Disney+ was seriously discussed,
-------------------------------------------
so the disney+ or hule idea were real.
