Fox Studio Head Stacey Snider Calls New Mutants A “Haunted-House Movie”
by Erik Amaya
In an in-depth interview with Variety about taking charge at 20th Century Fox, chairman and CEO Stacey Snider offered a glimpse of the studio’s upcoming New Mutants adaptation.
“[It] is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It’s like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they’re dangerous,” she explained. “The only solution is to put them in a Breakfast Club detention/Cuckoo’s Nest institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it’s strange and combustible inside.” I guess the team is in a place more like Legion‘s Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital or Melanie Bird’s attempt at the Xavier School.
But if the comparison to those two films were not enough of an elevator pitch, Snider added, “The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven’t seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like The Shining than ‘we’re teenagers let’s save the world.'” Which, to be honest, is the most interesting idea here. Not every superhero movie has to be about saving the world, so holding onto their sanity is a great way to be different.
In fact, creating that difference is key to Snider’s vision for the Marvel properties at Fox. “They have their own personality,” she explained. “Great effort has been put into making sure they’re differentiated.” Considering Fox’s X-Universe does not tell one continuing tale, the distinct tones of the recent spinoffs have been part of their success. I think it could even be argued that Deadpool and Logan are much better for being so wildly different from each other and the mainline X-Men series.
New Mutants stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, and Blu Hunt as a group of adolescent mutants apparently trying to save themselves from a secret mutant research facility while still dealing with their emerging powers. It’s scheduled for release on April 13th, 2018.
