Last week, some shocking details emerged about the making of The New Mutants, with one of the most surprising claims being that Storm was portrayed as a "sadistic jailer" in an earlier version of the screenplay. That was when Josh Boone's movie was supposed to tie into X-Men: Apocalypse, but Fox scrapped those plans after the 1980s set movie disappointed.
Entertainment Weekly has obtained a 2015 draft of Boone and Knate Lee's screenplay, which reportedly took inspiration from Chris Claremont and Barry Windsor-Smith's 1984 X-Men: Lifedeath.
Set three years after Apocalypse, the movie would have caught up with a Storm who had lost her ability to control the weather. Now rocking her punk rock look from the comic books, she was going to be shown struggling with PTSD from her days as one of Apocalypse's Horsemen, stumbling across the remains of a Native American reservation where Dani Moonstar is the sole survivor.
Demon Bear was once again set to be the lead villain, though this Ororo Munroe was far from the "sadistic jailer" we heard about last week. Instead, Professor X was set to appoint her as the "caretaker" for a new school for mutants in an abandoned hospital with a makeshift Danger Room "made from X-Men hand-me-downs."
Why weren't The New Mutants' leads part of Xavier's school? Well, their inability to control their powers was the key issue, and this draft also included Warlock as "alien tech given to Xavier to decipher by the NSA who turns out to be sentient" (we previously learned Sacha Baron Cohen was eyed for that role, but Fox cut the budget and that character).
Do you think this version of The New Mutants sounds better than the one in theaters?
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