Josh Boone Discusses His NEW MUTANTS Trilogy Pitch and Demon Bear
Director Josh Boone (The Fault of Our Stars) is gearing up for production on the New Mutants film that he’s been developing for Fox. A few weeks ago the director showed off an animatic he put together for the film, and also released some concept art featuring the main villain, Demon Bear, which was a really cool reveal. There's also been a recent rumor that the film will be called X-Men: The New Mutants.
Boone recently did an interview with Creative Screenwriting where he talked about pitching his New Mutants film with co-writer and friend Knate Gwaltney to the studio, and revealed that he initially pitched it as a trilogy.
“After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book. It walked them through a trilogy of New Mutant films that would build on each other. We used this program called Comic Life, and took all the images we had loved from the series and strung them together to show them the movie we wanted to do.
“We brought it to [producer] Simon [Kinberg] and he really liked it. We’ve been going for the past year and a half to get it ready, and I’m about to go location scout and we have a release date now.”
There’s no guarantee that the studio will green light the entire trilogy until they see how the first film does, but if they do, it’s good to know that Boone has a full story ready to be told and he knows exactly where it’s going. The director also mentions that there’s a release date, but the studio has yet to officially announce what that is. I imagine it will be sometime in 2018 since the movie is gearing up to start shooting next year.
The director also spoke about his longtime friendship with his co-writer, their love for comics, and in the process explained why they are using Demon Bear as the main villain of the story.
“We had loved this X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants. We had loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s run with Chris Claremont that had Demon Bear. It was really dark, interesting, and different from the typical X-Men stories that we had read.”
Boone even posted a photo of Gwaltney and himself reading comics as kids. It’ll be interesting to see what Boone ends up doing with this film. I hope it turns out well, and I hope that he gets to tell his complete story through a trilogy of films.
Me and #NewMutants co-writer @KnateLee absorbed in comics when we were kids! pic.twitter.com/Y9dqlZYxI6
— Josh Boone (@JoshBooneMovies) May 14, 2015
As you can see, they grew up on the same comics that a lot of us enjoyed reading. it sounds like he'll use that love of comics to make a great New Mutants movie.