We had heard this might be a possibility, but in a recent interview with Collider, The New Mutants director Josh Boone confirmed that the movie will boast a surprisingly short runtime. This doesn't usually bode well for a blockbuster, but the filmmaker actually explained the reasoning behind it.
"I think it's 98 minutes or something like that," Boone revealed. "It was never more than 104 even at its longest." Apparently, the original cut was around twenty minutes longer. "We put together all the deleted scenes for everybody. It was more just stuff that was too funny or tonally just didn't quite go together, but it's cute character moments that I think fans will like."
Looking at this from a common sense perspective, Disney could have decided to shorten the runtime in order to save money as The New Mutants had unfinished visual effects when they acquired Fox, and depending on how much work was required for these twenty minutes, they could have saved millions of dollars cutting them.
As for those deleted scenes, we have no idea when and where they will ultimately be released.
Regardless, Boone went on to explain that a big part of the hold up with the movie has been the fact he was only three quarters of the way into editing it, and that Andrew Buckland helped him finish it as original editors Matthew Dunnell and Rob Sullivan were busy working on The Stand (which Boone directed).
Right now, The New Mutants has a release date of August 28th, but whether it will actually end up playing in theaters is obviously unclear given everything that's happening in the world right now.
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