X-Men's horror story: Genre-bending <em>The New Mutants</em> and its long road to theaters

It certainly doesn&apos;t look like any X-Men release we&apos;ve seen before."I can&apos;t believe they&apos;re letting us make this movie!" Boone says of Fox studios while taking a break from filming. Now, the film is the last survivor of a discarded superhero franchise.Once set for theaters on April 2018, Mutants was put on ice for two years as The Walt Disney Company finalized a deal to acquire 21st Century Fox properties, including the cinematic rights to the X-Men. When the dust finally settled, the film was put back on the map for release on April 3, 2020. In a February interview with EW this year, Boone says the story "was much more connected to what was going on in the X-Men universe in the time." But with the drafting process, the concept "got further and further away from that and became present day.”A copy of Boone and Lee&apos;s original draft obtained by EW and dated November 2015 incorporated elements of Claremont and Barry Windsor-Smith&apos;s 1984 X-Men: Lifedeath comics in which Storm loses the power to psychically manipulate the weather. A January 2017 version of the script looks more like the movie filmed later that year: the school for new mutants setting was changed to a mysterious medical facility, many of the special effects-heavy set pieces in the beginning were heavily reduced, Warlock was cut entirely, and Ororo&apos;s role was replaced by another character from the comics, Cecilia Reyes, a mysterious physician keeping the kids on the grounds for observations. They have to deal with the crimes or sins they&apos;ve committed in the past because of guilt and things happening in the facility during the course of the film.”The visual template comes directly from Sienkiewicz, whose images made over the X-Men world in the &apos;80s as a terrifying, stylized place — the same way Boone hoped The New Mutants would make over the cinematic franchise. A studio summit held early in 2020 — a preview of sorts with a presentation by Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige — didn&apos;t even have Deadpool 3 on the official docket, despite Ryan Reynolds&apos; optimistic remarks on Live with Kelly and Ryan in December 2019.When asked for further comment after the summit, Reynolds, in a nod to comic-book-movie detractors, told EW in an email, "I agree with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola that Marvel films suffer from an alarming lack of Deadpool."That means the once-planned sequels, envisioned as different kinds of horror movies, are also a no go. But it needs to obviously be at the right time when it’s safe to go back.”HBO became the first to stream X-Men movies like Days of Future Past, Apocalypse, and Dark Phoenix on HBO Now and HBO Go. One might presume they also have dibs on The New Mutants.