Even before Deadpool was released and became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time worldwide, 20th Century Fox was looking at other ways to further expand their roster of X-Men movies. One of those is an adaptation of New Mutants from The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone, a project for which there have been few updates since it was announced last year.
Speaking with IGN however, X-Men producer Simon Kinberg spoke about the film and the progress being made.
“Deadpool was so different from the mainline X-Men movies, New Mutants… It’s maybe not as different as Deadpool, but it has its own unique, original voice to it…. That’s the fun for me, working in the X-Men universe, creating these sort of standalone movies that have a different vibe to them. And New Mutants has more of a YA [Young Adult] vibe to it.”
The prospect of who would make up the title team also came up and prompted Kinberg to tease:
“There’s a long, long list of names, and I’ll tell you some of the names on that list I don’t even know. That’s how deep it goes.”
Kinberg did go on to say that it’s likely fans will see “some familiar faces” in the film. One of those faces could be Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, since the character made his first comic book appearance in an issue of New Mutants. A number of other A-list mutants also appeared in the series, such as Professor Xavier, Magneto, and Kitty Pryde. Some members of the team have also appeared in the X-Men films as recently as X-Men: Days of Future Past, including Blink (Fan Bingbing), Warpath (Booboo Stewart), and Sunspot (Adan Canto), though it remains to be seen if they will appear in the film.
Created by Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod, The New Mutants first appeared in 1982 and focused on a group of teenage mutants as heroes in training. The series was home to a number of lower profile mutants in comparison to the fan favorite X-Men, such as Cannonball, Cypher, Magik, Wolfsbane, and Dani Moonstar.