Making movies is an extraordinarily difficult task in and of itself, but being in charge of a production within a superhero cinematic universe sounds like its own Dante’s Inferno. With the trend still going strong in the late 2010s, it made projects that ran into multiple issues leading up to their release really stick out among the bunch. Coming off of the successful screen adaptation of “The Fault in Our Stars,” director Josh Boone had been tapped to direct “The New Mutants” for 20th Century Fox as part of its “X-Men” movie lineup. Filming had been completed in 2017, but a disastrous flurry of delays, tonal shifts, other Fox projects, and studio acquisitions led to the superhero horror film floating in limbo until it was dumped into theaters smack dab in the middle of the quarantine era of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“The New Mutants” wasn’t as much of an unmitigated disaster as something like Josh Trank’s “Fant4stic,” but Boone’s superhero twist on “The Breakfast Club” was pretty much dead in the water. The whole experience left a negative effect on its director, who enjoyed working with the movie’s cast but little else once it came to actually releasing the film (via The Direct):

“It’s so hard because it was so traumatic. The studio was sold, and we hit a pandemic. […] The studio was sold during the shooting, and then the pandemic happened when they decided to release it. And it just was such a — I had a wonderful time. I love the cast so much, but making that. […] It took so many years, and it was so unfulfilling, ultimately.”

What makes “The New Mutants” so frustrating is that it’s a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen, to the point where no one even knows what recipe they’re working from anymore. The finished film always feels like it’s holding back a more thoughtful exploration of queer youth, abuse, and self actualization. It’s hard to put the blame entirely on Boone since his young adult horror movie was at the mercy of the elements, and it pretty much soured him on working within the realm of cinematic superheroes entirely:

“We didn’t really get to make the movie we wanted to make. We made half the movie we wanted to make. And the release was so compromised by the pandemic. […] I’d rather just never do it again, just to be honest.”

“A Nightmare on Elm Street” but with mutants from the “X-Men” universe should have been an easy slam dunk. The horror-adjacent “New Mutants” trailer presented a dark new spin on the Marvel franchise. But with every new release date delay came another development that called the entire project into question. “The New Mutants” was retrofitted from an ’80s set follow-up to “X-Men: Apocalypse” (arguably the worse movie of the two), got mixed up in a kerfuffle about its inclusion into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and was at the behest of reshoots that never took place. At a certain point, it became a joke as to whether the film would even see the light of day. The whole “New Mutants” experience didn’t totally kill Boone’s creative drive, however, as he’s bouncing back this weekend with the non-compromised film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s “Regretting You.”

“The New Mutants” is currently streaming on Disney+.