Latest trailer for long-delayed The New Mutants ratchets up the horror

Despite a long and bumpy road, 20th Century Fox's The New Mutants is finally coming to theaters this spring.

We were starting to think we'd never get to see it, but 20th Century Fox has dropped the latest trailer for The New Mutants, director Josh Boone's horror-inspired film originally developed as part of the The X-Men franchise. Slated for release in April, the film has been described as a "Stephen King meets John Hughes" YA horror film, with a dash of Stranger Things for good measure. The New Mutants does indeed feel very different tonally from prior films in The X-Men cinematic universe.

It's been a long road for Boone, who first pitched The New Mutants as a potential standalone trilogy to the studio after wrapping his 2014 film The Fault in Our Stars. From the start, Boone wanted to bring a different vibe to Mutants, much like Deadpool did in 2016. But while Deadpool went for raunchy R-rated comedy, Boone wanted to explore horror in the vein of classics like Rosemary's Baby and The Shining. "There are no costumes, there are no supervillains. We're trying to do something very, very different," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2017. But Boon later confessed to some frustration at the "neutering" of his original vision by the studio, which wanted more of a YA focus.

Early screenings of Boone's original cut were positive, and the success of IT in 2017 convinced the studio to play up the horror elements it had previously wanted to de-emphasize. Several reshoots were planned but never happened, in part because of conflicts in the actors' schedules, but also because Fox kept changing the planned release date to avoid competing with other films in its stable: Deadpool 2 in 2018 and last year's Dark Phoenix.

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