We may not know exactly when we’ll get to see The New Mutants just yet, but we now know how long the movie will be once we do. The X-Men adaptation has been long, long, long delayed, but got a spotlight today during a Comic-Con@Home panel that promises the film will be coming out. Sometime. And in addition to that Comic-Con@Home panel, Collider’s own Steve Weintraub got to speak with writer/director Josh Boone and some of the cast for an interview about the film.
The movie is a spinoff of sorts focusing on young mutants in the X-Men universe like Wolfsbane (Maisie Williams), Magik (Anya Taylor-Joy), and Cannonball (Charlie Heaton) being kept in a facility that may or may not be a prison. The film was made to be more of a horror twist on the X-Men movies, albeit with a young cast at its center.
While we’ll be sharing our full interview with Boone and the cast soon, we did want to highlight one particular point of interest: The New Mutants runtime. Indeed, Boone revealed that the film is a brisk 1 hour and 38 minutes in length and added that while it was never very long, deleted scenes will end up on the home video release:
“I think it’s 98 minutes or something like that. It was never more than 104 even at its longest. I remember my initial cut before we cut anything out was probably 20 minutes longer than that, but you’ll see all that on the special features – we put together all the deleted scenes for everybody. It was more just stuff that was too funny or tonally just didn’t quite go together, but it’s cute character moments that I think fans will like.”
Boone explained that he had about 75% of the editing done before the movie was shut down in the midst of the 20th Century Fox sale to Disney. He went off and directed the upcoming CBS All Access The Stand miniseries in the meantime, but when Disney finally turned its attention to The New Mutants, his longtime editors Matthew Dunell and Robb Sullivan were busy so he brought in Andrew Buckland to help finish things up:
“I’ve had the same editors since my first movie. They’re some of my best friends – I had dinner with them every Sunday night back when we used to be able to have dinner together. But we’ve done that for about a decade, and they just wrapped up cutting The Stand. So I cut basically 75% of this movie with them, and then they were cutting The Stand already when I finished it so I brought in another editor to do the final stuff with me. I’d say we were 75% done and then did the last percentage just in the past year.”
Despite reports that Fox was planning reshoots, additional photography on The New Mutants never happened. Disney originally set an April 2020 release date for the film but the COVID-19 shutdown forced them to move it off that date. As of now the film remains unscheduled, but as evidenced by today’s Comic-Con@Home panel and these interviews, Disney does still plan to promote the release of this movie.
via Collider