With The New Mutants finally coming to theaters after literally years of delays, there’s a massive story in Vulture about some of the reasons why the final X-Men movie from 20th Century Fox (now part of Disney) took so long to finish. The entire article is worth a read, so you can hear about why the film is opening theaters in the middle of a pandemic even though Disney has pushed several much bigger movies, like Artemis Fowl and Mulan to Disney+, and how at one point Storm appeared in the film in the role of a “prison warden” who serves as the New Mutants “sadistic jailer.” Uh... what?

That’s not the most surprising part. The real shocker is that while the version director Josh Boone initially shot back in 2017 is the one coming to theaters this week, Fox was supposedly “so displeased with the initial cut” that they actually “discussed throwing the entire movie out to ‘start over’ with a total reshoot.”

It sounds absurd, and far too expensive to justify. But according to Vulture, The New Mutants’ relatively small budget made it at least worth considering:

In postproduction, a studio executive noted that a total do-over would not necessarily be a financial wipeout given the film’s relatively bargain budget. ‘You could throw the movie out, start over, and it would still be the least expensive X-Men movie so far,” the sources recall a high-ranking Fox executive claiming.

In the end, the Disney/Fox merger slowed things down so much that by the time reshoots were possible, in Boone’s words, “everybody’s older” and there was no way to make new footage match the stuff they initially shot. So The New Mutants is just what it is, opening in theaters (at least the ones that are open themselves) tomorrow.

Gallery — Every X-Men Movie Ranked From Worst to Best:

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