New Mutants: Josh Boone Talks Antonio Banderas and New Characters

The Fault in Our Stars’ director Josh Boone had been tapped to helm New Mutants back in 2015, but indeed, the journey to the big screen has been rocky. The project has gone through countless delays as it made way for Deadpool 2 and Dark Phoenix, fell victim to the dealings behind the Fox-Disney merger, and just recently, had to be pushed back indefinitely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Man, these mutants sure seem to love catching breaks, don’t they?

Prior to the postponement of the New Mutants, Boone spoke with Entertainment Weekly in which he unveiled plans for the film which were later scrapped. Among those was the inclusion of an end-credits tag that would have set up a sequel. Here’s what he said:

It was intentional that we didn’t shoot it. We had always planned to have a tag at the end of the movie that introduced the villain for the next movie. We even had an actor cast, but because of the merger and because Marvel owns X-Men now and is going to do their own thing, there was no reason to go shoot it.

Boone then went on to state that they had even decided upon the actor who was going to appear in the scene. So, who was it? That individual was none other than Desperado and Pain and Glory actor, Antonio Banderas, who was once in talks to play Emmanuel da Costa, father of Henry Zaga’s Roberto da Costa (aka Sunspot). Interestingly enough, the director also mentioned the character’s ties to the Hellfire Club.

The planned sequel was also meant to take place in Brazil as Roberto would reconnect with his mother who is an archaeologist and whom Emmanuel had set his crosshairs on.

“We always intended to do New Mutants: Brazil as the second movie,” said Boone.

Furthermore, characters from the comics like Warlock (techno-organic alien, not Adam) and Karma (mutant with psionic capabilities) were considered for the sequel.

Karma was always going to be the villain in the second movie that would be absorbed into the group by the end. We had always wanted to bring Karma and Warlock into the second one when we couldn’t do it in the first one. For us, we wanted that initial core team [for the first movie]. We just couldn’t swap out Illyana. We felt like there was no reason to do [the movie] if we couldn’t bring that character to life in the first one. Swapping out for someone like Magma” — a different comic book figure with the ability to transform her body into a “magma” state — “I don’t feel fits very well in the kind of movie we were gonna make. I’ve got Bobby already. We tried to make a team that made sense.

Warlock, Marvel

The director also stated that he would be delighted to make a second film if New Mutants is well-received at the box-office.

In our heart of hearts, we hope [The New Mutants] makes a bunch of money so that we can go make the second one. We’re all just bummed at everything that happened. Just the merger and everything else. It had nothing to do with us personally and had an impact on every single movie at Fox at the time.

By the time this gets released, humans would have already developed societies on Mars, John Cena would have reverse-engineered the Invisible Man’s tech to become visible, and the DVD logo would satisfyingly bounce off the corner of the TV screen. But… I still have my fingers crossed for this one. At the very least, New Mutants is bringing something new to the mutant pantheon, and it’s going to be Magik-ally horrifying!

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