As the release of “New Mutants” (maybe?) draws nearer, we’ve been finding out more and more about what could have been in the long-delayed last gasp of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise. Speaking in an interview with Slash Film, the film’s director Josh Boone discussed how the critical failure of Bryan Singer’s final entry to the franchise, the often maligned and kind of loopy “X-Men: Apocalypse” lead to changes in his own film.
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“We were lucky. They really did want it to be different than other stuff. They really pushed us to keep it separate from X-Men stuff, even though it’s set in the X-Men universe. We had early drafts that were supposed to be in the same timeline as [X-Men:] Apocalypse, so it was originally going to be set in the ’80s. Originally, Professor X and Storm were in it, and Storm very much played the Alice Braga role. Over the course of months, a new studio head came in, they said they didn’t want any X-Men movies to take place in the past anymore, as if that was the reason that Apocalypse was bad. [laughs] So we were put in the position where we kind of rewrote it to be set now in a nebulous [point in time], because nobody knew how the movies had turned out. Dark Phoenix wasn’t out yet. Yeah, it’s there – they talk about Professor X and those things, but it doesn’t have cameos from anyone or anything like that.”
READ MORE: Josh Boone Details Plans For ‘New Mutants’ 2 & 3, Including An ‘Inferno’ X-Men Crossover
Considering the fairly thankless role that Alexandra Shipp’s version of Storm got in Apocalypse and its dismal followup Dark Phoenix, the character’s involvement would have been pretty exciting. But, thanks to various corporate shenanigans, that’s no longer a possibility. Now that a continuation of New Mutants seems somewhat unlikely, with Marvel having repossessed the IP through Disney’s purchase of Fox, Boone has been pretty open about his original plans for the series – detailing that the alien character Warlock had been cut from the film and would potentially have been included in planned sequels. Sadly, even in the case that “New Mutants” is actually released, it seems like we’ll never get to see that vision.