As much as I enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe, some of the best Marvel flicks have been far outside what Kevin Feige and his crew could ever consider. 2016’s Deadpool and this year’s Logan both broke the superhero mold in significant ways, and both received accolades and big box-office pulls as a result. Fox is trying some different stuff with some of its X-Men flicks, and it’s working. Now, they want to try it again with the upcoming New Mutants movie.
Speaking to Dark Horizons, 21st Century Fox head Stacey Snider dropped some surprising movie titles in reference to the influences director Josh Boone is pulling in:
If we’re going to make a superhero movie, we have to ask ourselves: ‘What’s our version? What’s a Fox Marvel film? When you look at films like Deadpool or Logan or the upcoming New Mutants, you’ll see they have their own personality. Great effort has been put into making sure they’re differentiated.
New Mutants is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It’s like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they’re dangerous.
The only solution is to put them in a Breakfast Club detention/Cuckoo’s Nest institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it’s strange and combustible inside. The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven’t seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like The Shining than ‘we’re teenagers let’s save the world.’”
That’s a lot of classic cinema right there, and a lot of really strange choices for influences. The Shining is a straight-up horror maze, while the other two are different takes on a bunch of different people forced to interact by way of imprisonment.
I can kind of make sense of it, though. If every movie is about saving the world, it gets boring. Marvel’s mutants have had to face a ton of adversity in their time, originating as a Civil Rights allegory and facing challenges to that affect, one after another, including forced registration and the conversion of Professor X’s school into a de facto reservation. Locking up some young mutants makes some sense as a starting point, and if these kids aren’t in control of their powers it could definitely turn into a horror flick pretty quickly.
If Fox wants to make more stuff like Logan and Deadpool instead of stuff like X-Men: Apocalypse, I’m not going to tell them no. This sounds interesting, and I want to see more of it. X-Men: The New Mutants is set to hit theaters on April 13, 2018.
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