Honestly, if you were hanging around the internet back in 2017, you probably remember that first teaser for The New Mutants. It was weird. It was spooky. It felt like something actually new in a superhero landscape that was starting to feel a little bit like a conveyor belt of capes and quips. Instead of spandex, we got a mental hospital. Instead of a cosmic threat, we got "Another Brick in the Wall" playing over shots of teenagers looking terrified in a dimly lit hallway.
Then, nothing.
The new mutants trailer promised a movie that wouldn't actually show up for years. It became a meme. People started joked that the movie didn't even exist, that it was just a collective fever dream we all had after watching Logan. But looking back at those trailers now, they tell a story of a movie caught between two worlds: the dying breath of the Fox X-Men universe and the massive, hungry shadow of Disney.
What the New Mutants Trailer Actually Showed Us
The first teaser, which dropped in October 2017, was a total hard pivot for the franchise. Director Josh Boone didn't hide his influences. He was basically aiming for a "Stephen King meets John Hughes" vibe. You could see it in the casting. You had Maisie Williams, fresh off Game of Thrones, looking nothing like Arya Stark. You had Charlie Heaton from Stranger Things bringing that same twitchy, nervous energy to Sam Guthrie.
And then there was Anya Taylor-Joy. Before she was a household name, she was Illyana Rasputin in this trailer, swinging a glowing blue sword and looking like she was ready to eat the scenery. The trailer didn't sell it as a superhero flick. It sold it as a haunted house movie. There were no costumes. No Magneto flying around with a stadium. Just kids trapped in a facility run by Alice Braga’s Dr. Reyes, who seemed... kinda sketchy from the jump.
The second major trailer didn't arrive until January 2020. Think about that gap. Two and a half years between the first and second look. By the time that second new mutants trailer hit, Disney had already bought Fox. The world was different. Yet, the footage still looked surprisingly consistent. It doubled down on the "Demon Bear" imagery—a massive, supernatural entity from the Bill Sienkiewicz comics that looked like it was made of nightmares and ink.
The Mystery of the Missing Reshoots
For a long time, the word on the street was that the movie was being delayed because it wasn't scary enough. Or maybe it was too scary? The rumors were messy. Reports suggested that after the success of IT (2017), Fox wanted Boone to go back and do massive reshoots to make the film a full-blown horror movie.
But here's the kicker: those reshoots never actually happened.
Because of the Disney-Fox merger, the production just sort of... froze. Boone later confirmed that when he finally got back into the editing room to finish the movie for its 2020 release, he realized they didn't need the reshoots. He just finished the version he originally wanted to make. It’s rare. Usually, these big studio movies are tinkered with until they’re unrecognizable, but the new mutants trailer we saw in 2020 was remarkably close to the soul of the 2017 version.
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Why the Tone Mattered
- The Horror Angle: It was the first time a mainstream Marvel property tried to be a "rubber-reality" supernatural horror.
- The Cast: It featured a "who's who" of 2010s teen stars (Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Anya Taylor-Joy).
- The Scale: It was small. Intimate. It took place almost entirely in one location.
The trailers focused heavily on the trauma of the characters. We saw Sunspot (Henry Zaga) struggling with the fact that he accidentally burned his girlfriend. We saw Rahne (Williams) dealing with the "M" brand on her neck and her religious upbringing. It was heavy stuff for a movie that was technically supposed to be part of the same universe as X-Men: Apocalypse.
Why People Kept Watching the Trailer
There's a specific kind of fascination with "lost" media. Every time a new release date was announced—and then cancelled—people went back to the new mutants trailer to see if they’d missed something. It was supposed to come out in April 2018. Then February 2019. Then August 2019. Then April 2020 (which got hit by the global pandemic).
By the time it actually hit theaters in August 2020, the trailer had basically become the movie for most people.
It represented the end of an era. It was the final Fox X-Men movie. No matter how it performed, we knew the characters weren't going to show up in Avengers: Secret Wars the next week. The trailer had this "last of its kind" energy. It was a remnant of a time when studios were willing to let directors get really weird with the X-Men license because they didn't have to worry about a "Sacred Timeline."
What We Can Learn From It
Looking back at the new mutants trailer today, the biggest takeaway isn't about the CGI or the jump scares. It’s about the volatility of the film industry. A movie can be "finished" and still sit on a shelf for years because of corporate spreadsheets.
If you're looking to dive back into this corner of the Marvel world, don't just watch the movie and call it a day. Go find the Bill Sienkiewicz run of the comics from the 80s. That’s where the real magic is. The movie tried to capture his surreal, jagged art style, and while it didn't always stick the landing, the ambition was definitely there.
Check out the original 1980s Demon Bear Saga. It explains why the trailer felt so different from anything else. Also, if you’re a fan of Anya Taylor-Joy, seeing her early work here alongside her roles in The Witch and Split shows exactly why she became a star. She was always good at playing characters that are just a little bit dangerous.
Stop waiting for a sequel. It’s not coming. But the movie we got—and the trailers that teased it for three long years—is a fascinating time capsule of a transition period in Hollywood history.