NEW MUTANTS director Josh Boone has a trilogy of films mapped out.

THE NEW MUTANTS director Josh Boone recently had a chat with Creative Screenwriting, where he opened up about his passion for the comic book property and explained the development of the film’s screenplay.

“We had loved this X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants,” said Boone about him and co-writer Knate Gwaltney. “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.”

Demon Bear was revealed to be the film’s unique antagonist after an early animatic “leaked” last month.

“After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book,” he continued. “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.”

Boone said he’s been preparing for the project for a year and a half, and is about to do location scouting. He also confirmed that a release date has been locked-in with 20th Century Fox.

“It’s a balance of getting to do things in a bubble, which I’d say is the best way of writing anything, and then having to negotiate all the politics of studio filmmaking, which is its own special beast. With New Mutants, we wrote a few drafts, and I brought in Scott Neustadter and Mike Weber, who are the friends of mine that adapted The Fault in Our Stars, to do a draft while we did something else. My guess is that it will never be done until we’re done shooting! [Laughs]”

Boone also said the script has “constantly morphed” since its inception and that it will “probably continue to morph as we’re making it.”

Production begins in Spring of 2017 for a 2018 theatrical release.

Source: Creative Screenwriting via Collider.