'New Mutants' Will Complete Reshoots This Year, Might As Well Be 'Old Mutants'

It's been 84 years since The New Mutants was supposed to hit theaters. I still remember when the trailer played before showings of Mutiny on the Bounty. Those were simpler times.

In all seriousness, the movie was originally slated to be released in April 0f 2018. But it's been pushed back little by little since then, with the most recent update putting it in theaters on April 3, 2020. Walt Disney Pictures is still hoping to give the X-Men spin-off from 20th Century Fox a theatrical release instead of dumping it elsewhere, but that will likely depend on how The New Mutants rehoots play out when they finally happen later this year.

New Mutants producer Simon Kinberg has been making the publicity rounds for directing Dark Phoenix, so questions have inevitably turned to the status of The New Mutants. Digital Spy was able to get him to provide an update on the movie from director Josh Boone, and Kinberg said:

"What's happening is we're gonna do reshoots this year on that film and it has a new release date from Disney. That's really it. Part of it was figuring out what the re-shoots were gonna be, the pick-ups, and the other part of it was getting that cast back together."

So The New Mutatnts still has to complete reshoots. It sounds like what held the schedule up was getting the ensemble cast of the movie back together. After all, it includes Anya Taylor-Joy as Magik, Maisie Williams as Wolfsbane, Henry Zaga as Sunspot, Blu Hunt as Dani Moonstar, and Charlie Heaton as Cannonball. At least a couple of those stars are quite in-demand at the moment, so getting them back together to do extensive reshoots probably wasn't easy.

Then again, it also sounds like that figuring out what they needed to accomplish with those reshoots also required some time. There were rumblings that the reshoots were intended to make the movie scarier. Another story said the reshoots were going to add another character to the mix, but that was when the movie was slated for release in August of 2019.  We've also heard the movie could still end up being R-rated after reshoots are done, but that seems far less likely now that Disney will be the studio releasing the film and likely wants to recoup whatever they can from this troubled production.

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the movie ends up being pushed to Disney+ or even Hulu. Unless the reshoots are able to fix whatever is wrong with The New Mutants, this seems like a lost cause, especially since it's not likely to start a franchise now that Marvel Studios will be in control of all the Marvel Comics characters that 20th Century Fox used to own. Stay tuned to see what happens.