At the
Star Wars Rebels season finale screening this week, I asked Simon Kinberg – who is an EP on Rebels, while also playing a key role as a producer on the X-Men films – for an update on one of those projects, The New Mutants.
Last year it was revealed that Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) was attached to co-write and direct the film, based on the Marvel comic about a team of young X-Men in training.
Said Kinberg, of the current status of
The New Mutants, “
Josh Boone and his writing partner are working on the script. They're doing a really nice job of it, and it's a really cool one, because in many ways, like Deadpool was so different from the mainline X-Men movies, New Mutants… It’s maybe not as different as Deadpool, but it has its own unique, original voice to it."
Added Kinberg, "
That's the fun for me, working in the X-Men universe, creating these sort of standalone movies that have a different vibe to them. And New Mutants has more of a YA [Young Adult] vibe to it.”
As for the characters we might see in the film, Kinberg noted that when it came to X-Men and New Mutant-related characters the films haven’t used yet, “
There's a very deep bench. There's a long, long list of names, and I'll tell you some of the names on that list I don't even know. That's how deep it goes.”
Previous X-Men movies have used characters associated with the New Mutants, including Warpath, Sunspot and, of course, Professor X, the team’s original mentor. Speaking to whether we might see any already-introduced characters from the X-Men movies in the New Mutants film, Kinberg
remarked, “Traditionally, the New Mutants have some characters that cross over from the mainline X-Men movies. As we are going, I would say it's likely that you will see some familiar faces.”