Over the course of the pandemic, audiences got used to movie release dates being pushed into the future. Movies like Black Widow kept getting the premiere pushed because studios wanted to be able to release the films in theatres rather than only on streaming services. Marvel's The New Mutants, however, was falling victim to the pushing of release dates long before COVID hit, as it was stuck in a sort of post-production hell for years after the initial shooting period.
The New Mutants became one of those movies that seemed like it was never going to come out, reaching a mythic, "how bad could this movie possibly be to be delayed for this long" type of status, in a similar way to something like Chaos Walking. Upon its release, it met with negative to mediocre reviews for the most part, with most viewers seeming underwhelmed and disappointed. It makes sense; after waiting so long for this movie to come out, it would be majorly disappointing if the final product wasn't anything spectacular. But why did it take so long for this film to get released? What was going on behind the scenes that really hindered the creative process?
For the unfamiliar, The New Mutants was supposed to be the latest (and final) installment of the X-Men series of films (though it isn't heavily related to the others and is more of a standalone), and was marketed as a superhero/horror hybrid. The story is about a group of teenage mutants who are just starting to discover their powers while they are being held in a research facility against their will. Its stars include Maisie Williams as Rahne Sinclair (Wolfsbane), Charlie Heaton as Sam Guthrie (Cannonball), and Anya-Taylor Joy as Illyana Rasputin (Magik).
In 2015, it was announced that Josh Boone, who had just directed the hit teen film The Fault In Our Stars (based on the novel of the same name by John Green), would be directing and co-writing the New Mutants movie. This previous experience working in the young adult/coming-of-age genre seemed to indicate that he would have a good handle on how to approach a story about teen mutants. Boone and Knate Lee (a film producer) worked on the script together, even earning the approval of The New Mutants comic creator Bill Sienkiewicz, who felt that the screenplay did a good job of expanding on the comics while also being its own new, fresh entity. The film was being marketed as "Stephen King meets John Hughes", which is a pretty high honor to bestow, and a really interesting mix of genres.
Filming commenced in 2017, the initial shoot being about 2 months long. During this time, Boone said that the process was stressful for him and that his horror visions for the film were being "neutered" during filming (he wanted the film to have a hard R rating). This seems to have been an omen for how the post-production process was going to go for him, as the film was about to embark on a long process of delays, reshoots, and warring creative visions.
Post-production started in 2017, and eventually, there was a finished version of the film that Boone felt happy with that was able to mix the tone of teen movies and horror movies together. They screened this version of the film for test audiences, who seemed to react well to it and even compared the movie to Deadpool. 20th Century Fox wanted the film to go into reshoots to make it more teen-friendly, but after the initial trailer release, it was clear that fans were more receptive to the horror elements than the John Hughes ones. The release date ended up getting pushed from April 2018 to February 2019 so that reshoots could be done to focus in on the horror elements, as well as allowing some space between the New Mutants release and the release of Deadpool 2, which was supposed to release in the summer of 2018.
The release date then got pushed back again (to August 2019), this time to avoid being overshadowed by Dark Phoenix. Fox also wanted extensive reshoots done on The New Mutants, to the point of the studio wanting about half of the movie to be redone. New plotlines were added, and the studio wanted the film to feel very distinct, in the ways that Deadpool and Logan had managed to do before it. Apparently, The New Mutants wasn't scary enough, which is ironic considering Fox initially wanted Boone to tone down the horror, but now they had completely changed face.
The next disaster in this series of unfortunate events was Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox in March of 2019. Disney was clearly thinking that they could implement the mutants into the MCU at some point, and didn't seem to care what happened to the two remaining X-Men movies that had yet to release: Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants. Basically, everything at Fox was in a state of flux, and it was unclear when (or even if) The New Mutants was going to come out. The New Mutants release date was pushed back yet again to April 2020, with rumors about more reshoots circling (implying that those earlier reshoots had never even happened).
Then came the catastrophic cinematic flop that was Dark Phoenix. It completely bombed at the box office and was nearly universally disliked by critics. This made Disney wary of the New Mutants release, and execs were reportedly unhappy with what they had seen so far from the film. However, despite it all, it still seemed like the movie would be released on its April 2020 date - it even received its first trailer in more than two years. All seemed well...at least, until a certain worldwide pandemic essentially stopped the movie industry in its tracks.
Disney was pushing back the release dates for all of their movies, hoping to eventually release some in theatres when the pandemic died down, and throwing some of the others onto streaming services. Around this time, news also came out that confirmed that those previously mentioned reshoots for The New Mutants had never really happened, which meant that the final product was still Josh Boone's initial vision for the film. It was pushed back for the final time to August 2020, when it was finally released to the public, making a worldwide total of $48.1 million at the box office. Whether it was due to the pandemic or the messed up production process (or perhaps a bit of both), The New Mutants ended up being one of the lowest-grossing superhero movies ever, despite topping the box office during its release.
It's unfortunate that everything surrounding the process of making and releasing this film seemed so cursed, because it never really stood a chance. Between Covid-19 impeding the production process and release dates, and the warring creative visions of Fox and Boone, it's almost surprising that The New Mutants came out at all. In general, it's disappointing that the final installments of Fox's X-Men (Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants) were such a lackluster sendoff to the franchise. Perhaps in the future, there's a way that the MCU will be able to bring the X-Men in and revive their stories for a new audience, because it would be a shame if this is the final note they go out on.