‘The New Mutants’ Was Never Going to be An MCU Film
By George Robbins
As we are all painfully aware of at this point, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, is perhaps the most famous franchise ever. It has been one of the longest lasting on-going movie franchises and is still continuing to bring in new fans as time goes on. The last film to be a part of the MCU that has released was ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ and it finished off the third phase of the MCU. As of now, the next film that is meant to release is ‘Black Widow’ but due to the pandemic, its release date has been pushed to almost the end of the year. The next entries that are supposed to come into existence after this movie are going to feature a lot of new heroes and it will be an exciting time for the MCU as a whole.
The MCU has had a lot happening to it as of late and no one is quite sure of the future of the MCU given the situation with the pandemic. Adding to this was recent and tragic loss of Chadwick Boseman who played the ‘Black Panther’ character. It isn’t a great time in the world at the moment, but the MCU is still moving forward with whatever they can. Marvel Studios has a pretty good idea about what they will be doing over the next couple of years. The thing is, though, is it something that the fans will be wanting because they have all been pretty vocal over the past year or so about upcoming projects. One of the things that gets mentioned a lot is that people want the X-Men to become an official part of the MCU.
Just recently, we saw the long-awaited release for the movie ‘The New Mutants’ which was meant to serve as a standalone film. The movie was considered a remnant of the X-Men franchise that was being worked on by Fox before they were acquired by Disney last year. After they were acquired the movie continued being worked on, and was set to release back in April but the pandemic pushed the official release until recently. This past weekend was the opening weekend for the film and the movie did not receive good reviews. Although the movie was poorly reviewed, it did help thee box office a little bit by bringing in over $3 million, which is the most theaters have seen since March.
What many MCU fans were hoping was that ‘The New Mutants’ would serve as a gateway movie for the MCU given that Disney owned the property and they could get the X-Men into the franchise that way. Unfortunately, it isn’t just the bad reviews that prevent this from being the case, but also the fact that it was never the plan to begin with. Director Josh Boone says there have been zero talks with Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige about incorporating the mutants into the MCU. This means that, as far as we now know, there are no plans to somehow incorporate the X-Men into the MCU any time soon. It could be many years before this even becomes a remote possibility and even then, there is no guarantee.