Notorious Marvel flop The New Mutants is finally making its way to Disney+. Director Josh Boone’s take on Marvel Comics’ New Mutants began production in 2017 with an eye toward a 2018 release. But thanks to various delays, the X-Men film wouldn’t get to movie screens until 2020.
All those delays unfortunately cast a pall over The New Mutants, making it feel like a bomb before it even arrived. It didn’t help of course that Disney seemed to completely disown the film, which it inherited from Fox after 2019’s mega-merger. And when the movie was finally finished and ready to drop in early 2020, COVID had arrived to wreak havoc on the entire movie industry, pushing back its release even further. The New Mutants finally did hit theaters in August 2020 and died with a whimper, grossing just $49 million.
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The New Mutants is now understandably something of a maligned chapter in the history of Marvel movies and the X-Men franchise. But those who wish to give it another chance will soon get to do so on Disney+, as the streamer is finally adding the 2020 bomb to its lineup. As reported by Screen Crush, The New Mutants will hit Disney’s streaming service on October 14, 2022.
With a critics score of just 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, to go with an audience score of just 56%, The New Mutants may seem like a film that has rightfully been cast aside by history. However, the movie does have a few elements that may make it attractive to Disney+ viewers despite its overall reputation as a bomb. First-and-foremost, there’s the presence of Anya Taylor-Joy, who has only become a hotter name in Hollywood since she signed on to play Magik back in 2017. And the film’s young cast also features a pair of big small-screen stars in Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams and Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton. Fans of 1980s horror may also get a kick out of the film’s story and atmosphere, which were inspired by movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors.
New Mutants hardcores of course had their big issues with the movie when it came out back in 2020. The comics' creator Bob McLeod himself even spoke out against the film for making too many changes to the characters, and for the film’s credits misspelling his name as “MacLeod.” And certainly it did not help the movie’s cause that Disney wanted no part of paying for reshoots and didn’t particularly care about marketing the film. The New Mutants at one point was billed as a potential revival for the X-Men franchise, but after it came out, that franchise remained in limbo. But perhaps the misfit 2020 movie's hidden virtues will become evident as fans are given a chance to reassess it as a horror-inspired Halloween watch on Disney+.