9 Upcoming Movies Studios Have No Confidence In

3. The New Mutants

The Movie

An adaptation of the famed Marvel comic, focusing on five youngsters who discover their new mutant abilities while held captive in a secret government facility.

The film stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, Blu Hunt and Alice Braga, while Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) co-writes and directs.

What's Wrong?

Despite the clear appeal of the project injecting some much-needed darkness into Fox's X-Men franchise, The New Mutants has been one of the most troubled major film projects of the last few years.

While Fox's dodgy-looking Dark Phoenix will at least benefit from a recognisable brand, numerous A-list actors and a promising Chinese box office, this spin-off lacks almost all of that. Furthermore, it started shooting back in July 2017 and has been delayed numerous times since (totalling 14 months away from its original April 2018 date).

Reports emerged last year that Boone bristled with Fox executives over the tone of the film, and after initially instructing him to tone down the horror elements, they then changed their minds after seeing the positive social media engagement with the first horror-centric trailer.

Reshoots intended to ramp up the intensity of the horror still haven't taken place and the cast is none-the-wiser about the situation, though it's clearly becoming increasingly unlikely that the film will meet its August 2 release date.

Rumours have suggested that with Disney's recent acquisition of Fox, The New Mutants may end up dumped on the Disney-owned streaming platform Hulu without reshoots being performed, which would be the most damning vote-of-no-confidence possible.

But given how the avalanche of negative PR against the film has pretty much made it a poisoned well commercially, it might be for the best to just make it available on streaming and allow everyone to move on. Still, it'd be quite the undignified end to Fox's run of X-Men movies.