New Mutants Delay Will Reportedly Add A New Character To Movie

The plot thickens.

Earlier this year, Fox announced that it would be delaying its upcoming X-Men spinoff The New Mutants from an imminent April release date to February 2019. The delay was shocking for a number of reasons — for one, the marketing for the movie had already kicked into high gear, with horror-themed posters and a trailer rollout already in progress before the delay was announced. 

Secondly, the delay was unusually lengthy — nearly an entire year, which would seem to indicate trouble behind the scenes. Despite that gut suspicion, no reports of turmoil emerged from the movie's production following the announcement, and star Maisie Williams shrugged off the delay two weeks ago as being done for nothing more than technical reasons. 

"It's a mutant film, there's a lot of effects," Williams said. "There's a lot of work that goes into the movie. They really make the movie after we finish shooting." 

But now, a new piece about the $52.4 billion Disney-Fox merger from The Hollywood Reporter has added a new wrinkle to the story of New Mutants' delay, revealing in a curious tidbit in the middle of the piece that the movie was delayed for additional photography to add an entirely new character to the story.

Up to now, the narrative behind the New Mutants delay has emphasized that the movie wasn't being held back for quality control reasons, but was instead done to get the movie out of a packed spring release window and to tighten up the movie's special effects. The news of the character addition, if true, punctures that narrative, and begs the question of what went weird about the movie's production to make such a late-game, drastic move seem necessary, especially when trailers for the feature were already hitting theaters.

The report indicates nothing about who the character is or what their function would be in the story, which leaves us only with speculation — and boy, is there ever a lot to speculate about. The pipe dream idea is of course that the delay would add a character from Marvel Studios' stable to the movie in a Nick Fury moment, bringing the world of the mutants officially into the Marvel Cinematic Universe — but something so dramatic is highly unlikely at this point while the Disney-Fox merger is still being hammered out. 

Another possibility is that the character is another established mutant — Magneto, for instance, or someone else from the wider X-Men universe. It could be someone we know, or someone from an upcoming Fox project like the recently announced Multiple Man, Kitty Pryde, Doctor Doom or Silver Surfer projects. Still another possibility is that the character is another, previously-unseen-on-screen fixture from the New Mutants comics being added to the film for storytelling purposes in a late-game plot revision — at this point, we just don't know.

No matter what the truth ends up being, we now know that there's more going on with New Mutants than what's been made public, and the movie that we've seen so far could look a lot different by the time it actually sees release on February 22, 2019. 

The New Mutants is being written and directed by Josh Boone, and stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, and Alice Braga. Check out the trailer down below.