They’re not new yet.

TheWrap says that New Mutants, which was originally scheduled to open April 13, 2018, has been bumped back almost an entire year, and will now open on February 22, 2019. This is part of several adjustments to the studio’s X-Men movies; Deadpool 2 is moving up by a few weeks this summer, while Gambit, which was supposed to open next February, will now debut in the summer of 2019. According to TheWrap, the New Mutants’ move...

... is being made because [it] isn’t scary enough. The film follows five teenagers with mysterious pasts who have just discovered their mutant powers and are struggling to escape a secret facility where they are being held against their will.

The film has an usual creative pedigree for a superhero movie. It’s directed by Josh Boone, who previously directed the teen romance The Fault in Our Stars. Boone also co-wrote the film with Kante Gwaltney (The Disaster Artist scribes Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber were previously listed on IMDb as also having written for the film; in an interview late last year they told me their contribution was extremely minor.) None of these writers have serious credentials in horror.

And it’s been a little surprising to see the trailers and marketing for the film so far, and to see just how heavily they have pushed The New Mutants as a horror film. The original comic has had a few forms over the years, but none that you would really call “horror.” Even if you assumed Boone was taking his inspiration from the dark stories by writer Chris Claremont and illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz, they were still making superhero comics, albeit with a heavy dose of fantasy and nightmarish imagery. Recasting this story as the tale of a group of kids trapped in a sort of insane asylum for mutants was a curious choice.

It could still be one that pays off; with an additional year to work on the film, a lot could be fixed or improved or changed completely. But bumping the movie back so far certainly isn’t a good sign. Let’s see what happens next February. Here’s the last New Mutants trailer from a few months ago.

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