Upcoming New Mutants film project envisioned as trilogy

Now that two X-Men trilogies are in the can and Hugh Jackman is about to say his final goodbye to Wolverine, Fox is looking for different ways to continue telling comic book stories while keeping things fresh. There are talks about the next main X-Men film, but that seems a bit far down the road. For now, The New Mutants looks like the next big thing with The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone adapting the X-Men spin-off comic series to the big screen. We already knew a movie was coming, but now there’s news that it might turn into a trilogy.

Boone spoke with Creative Screenwriting about the project and how he pitched it to executives saying, “After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book. It walked them through a trilogy of New Mutant films that would build on each other. We used this program called Comic Life, and took all the images we had loved from the series and strung them together to show them the movie we wanted to do. We brought it to [producer] Simon [Kinberg] and he really liked it. We’ve been going for the past year and a half to get it ready, and I’m about to go location scout and we have a release date now.”

Regarding the characters that will be featured in the film, Boone has teased some names like Cannonball, Magik and Wolfsbane, but there hasn’t been any confirmation. As for the villain, Boone brought up a particular character during the interview as he recalled reading the comics.

“We had loved this X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants,” Boone said, referring to he and his co-writer Knate Gwaltney. “We had loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s run with Chris Claremont that had Demon Bear. It was really dark, interesting, and different from the typical X-Men stories that we had read.”

If, indeed, the villain is Demon Bear, Boone has to be careful how he executes this aspect. A character like Demon Bear might be fine on paper, but not everything translates to the screen effectively. Whatever the case may be, this is all great news for fans of the younger generation of mutants who we’ll see come to life in the very near future.

from Nerd Reactor