Josh Boone’s X-Men spin-off The New Mutants began shooting on early 2017, and here we are in 2020 and the film’s finally hitting theaters. In the wake of the 20th Century Fox/Disney buyout, rumors of reshoots swirled, but were they all false?
Reshoots are commonplace today. With so much happening while this film sat on a shelf, the assumption was Marvel would retool the film a bit to fit into the MCU a bit better. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Marvel wants the film to stay exactly the way it’s made.
The New Mutants director, Josh Boone, tells EW:
“Everybody said we did reshoots! We’ve never done reshoots. And I’ll tell you this: if there hadn’t been a merger, I’m sure we would’ve done reshoots the same way every movie does pickups.
We didn’t even do that because by the time the merger was done and everything was settled, everybody’s older.”
One of the film’s stars Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) even heard about the reshoots, but says:
“The movie is exactly the movie we set out to make. I was nervous when they were talking about reshooting or re-editing that it was gonna be very different, but honestly, it’s exactly what we set out to do.”
Both say it was aggravating and confusing because the news told them more than Marvel could:
Williams: “I would be in press for something else and then [reporters would] ask me about [The New Mutants] and the last thing I heard was, ‘Nothing until we know something.’”
Boone: “We had heard nothing because of the merger. It was radio silence for about a year where we had no new information at all.”
Boone goes on to talk about the way he finally finished editing The New Mutants:
“When they called me right before I went to go make The Stand and said, ‘Would you come finish the movie?’ I said, ‘I would f—in’ love to come finish the movie!’.
In the editing, we were probably 75 percent done. We came back and finished it up. It took a couple months, and it was nice to be able to come back.
Knate [Lee], my co-writer, and I, we hadn’t seen it in a year. We did a bunch of things here and there that we hadn’t thought about or noticed a year before.”
The first people Boone gathered to view the first official screening of The New Mutants was the main cast. They were the first people he wanted to show the film to.
