Just weeks ago, we learned that one possible villain in the upcoming ‘New Mutants’ movie is Demon Bear, a nightmarish figure from early issues of the comic series written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by the innovative Bill Sienkiewicz, a run that director Josh Boone points to as a major inspiration on his film interpretation.
“[As kids] We had loved this X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants. We had loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s run with Chris Claremont that had Demon Bear. It was really dark, interesting, and different from the typical X-Men stories that we had read.”
Indeed, Boone and co-writer Knate Gwaltney grew up together and spent hours reading comics, which informed their approach to this film. And while he doesn’t confirm the presence of Demon Bear in the film, he does specifically mention the character.
Boone even posted a photo of himself and Gwaltney reading comics as kids on Twitter:
Me and #NewMutants co-writer @KnateLee absorbed in comics when we were kids! pic.twitter.com/Y9dqlZYxI6
— Josh Boone (@JoshBooneMovies) May 14, 2015
Boone discussed his pitch to 20th Century Fox and naturally, it was in the form of a comic book:
“After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book. It walked them through a trilogy of New Mutant films that would build on each other. We used this program called Comic Life, and took all the images we had loved from the series and strung them together to show them the movie we wanted to do.
We brought it to [producer] Simon [Kinberg] and he really liked it. We’ve been going for the past year and a half to get it ready, and I’m about to go location scout and we have a release date now.”
Fox recently locked in November 2, 2018 and February 14, 2019 for unnamed Marvel movies so it’s very likely that ‘New Mutants’ will take one of those, most likely the November date as from the sound of things, if Boone is about to start scouting locations. Presumably, filming will begin sometime later this year , allowing enough time for post-production for a late 2018 release.
‘The Fault In Our Stars’ screenwriters “>Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber were recently brought on board to work on the ‘New Mutants’ script after Boone and Gwaltney already submitted one treatment.
The film is said to focus on Danielle Moonstar/Mirage, Samuel Guthrie/Cannonball, Roberto da Costa/Sunspot, Illyana Rasputin/Magik and Rahne Sinclair/Wolfsbane. The film will also include Lockheed the dragon.
Are you excited to see these teenage heroes-in-training on the big screen?
Source: Creative Screenwriting via /Film
