The New Mutants Was Set in the 1980s Before X-Men: Apocalypse Failed

Josh Boone has revealed that The New Mutants was a very different film before X-Men: Apocalypse fell flat at the box office, including being set much earlier. Boone spoke with /Film for a recent interview and noted that the long-delayed X-Men-set horror film, which is supposedly hitting screens on August 28th, was set in the 1980s before Apocalypse fell shot.

“We were lucky,” Boone said. “They really did want it to be different than other stuff. They really pushed us to keep it separate from X-Men stuff, even though it’s set in the X-Men universe. We had early drafts that were supposed to be in the same timeline as X-Men: Apocalypse, so it was originally going to be set in the ’80s. Originally, Professor X and Storm were in it, and Storm very much played the Alice Braga role.”

Boone’s comments back up reports from a few years ago when the film was being developed that the movie would feature James McAvoy and Alexandra Shipp reprising their roles as Xavier and Storm. He continued,

“Over the course of months, a new studio head came in, they said they didn’t want any X-Men movies to take place in the past anymore, as if that was the reason that X-Men: Apocalypse was bad. So we were put in the position where we kind of rewrote it to be set now in a nebulous point in time, because nobody knew how the movies had turned out. Dark Phoenix wasn’t out yet. Yeah, it’s there – they talks about Professor X and those things, but it doesn’t have cameos from anyone or anything like that.”