Exclusive Interview: New Mutants director Josh Boone

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

This weekend marks the release of one of the most oddly controversial movies in years – THE NEW MUTANTS. I say oddly because what initially began life as a modestly budgeted teen superhero flick, has morphed into a long-shelved passion project for director Josh Boone, with Disney steadfastly opting to release the film in theatres rather than on VOD. Press screenings have not been held for critics, and, to be completely transparent, I must admit that when I conducted this interview I had not seen the film. Nevertheless, I found Boone to be highly engaging and very forthright about the whole process of getting the film into theaters. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation.

• On the film being made at Fox before the Disney acquisition: We were one studio right through the shooting and then right during editing the merger happened. We were really in limbo for over a year and really the movie just stopped. All of the visual effects weren’t done which is why the early trailers from before, you were only seeing the practical stuff we did. It’s only been in the past year that I’ve gotten to finish the visual fx. It’s funny (the development process). It started out as something big that got smaller and smaller as the budgetary process came in and we got things closer to where it needed to be. It became intimate and character-driven. It was always that and our influences were always John Hughes movies and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and absolutely A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: THE DREAM WARRIORS. 
• On how it’s different from what you might see in the MCU: It has all the superheroics and Marvel stuff you could want in the last forty minutes of the movie. It’s got all that stuff I love too but I really wanted it to be driven by a teen cast because every superhero movie is always driven by an adult one. I felt like it would be really great if we could speak to kids the way Buffy spoke to kids, where it really helped kids that were outsiders or like me when I was a kid. To use this as a way to smuggle a bunch of other things to the audience through the guise of a horror/ supernatural X-Men movie. But there are a bunch of other things that are in it too that I think are interesting and different. And we were able to get it all through in some way because they were more worried about DARK PHOENIX. 
• On how the issues with DARK PHOENIX affected NEW MUTANTS: It cost so much more, it had a more lucrative cast that they had to deal with. Our movie really did get kinda left by the wayside while they finished that film during the merger. They were in much direr straits than us because that was originally supposed to be two movies, ours had a little bit of cleanup that it needed to not make it seem like it immediately had to be followed by a sequel that would connect to an X-Men movie. So it was just clean-up from a merger and they had much more of a cleanup job than we had to do. Our movie never really changed, it just stopped. Unlike 95% of other movies that do reshoots and pickups, which I’m sure we would have done under normal circumstances, we never shot anything else so it was always by design what it was. When we went back and finished it up we just tightened things up about a year later, did a couple of tweaks here and there, and clipped out the things that were unnecessarily kind of attached to a universe that doesn’t exist anymore. 
• On expectations: It always tracked so much better than DARK PHOENIX, way more people responded to our trailer but they (the studio) did not care about our movie by comparison. I don’t think they necessarily knew what to do with it in some ways because it was character-driven and more like THE BREAKFAST CLUB. It wasn’t something that was typical of a superhero movie. It has all that, but like I said, it also has a gay love story, probably the first one at Disney for sure and like one of the first superhero movies that really has one that’s an integral part of the plot and story and the whole thing hangs on it.