New Mutants director Josh Boone said the planned trilogy would have joined X-Men in “a big Marvel type way”

Josh Boone has revealed that classic X-Men characters were cut from long-awaited The New Mutants.

Boone revealed to ComicBook.com that The New Mutants was to be the first in an ambitious trilogy, “...then eventually we dovetail with [Simon Kinberg’s] X-Men movies," he said of their plans. "They’d come together like in a big Marvel type way. But you know, that’s not what happened.”

He added there were initial plans for Deadpool characters to cross over, with a Colossus cameo in the works. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Ilyana Rasputin (Magik) is the younger sister of the super-sized metal mutant, so that would have been an easy opportunity for him to show up someday down the line. “We definitely wrote [a scene] where Ilyana was in like a field in Russia that was being tilled,” he said. “And suddenly her brother comes in and you see all the armour come on him and stop the thing from running her over.”

Speaking on the impact of the Disney/Fox merger, Boone said: “It’s just like we made this at such a strange time, [as] in the circumstances under which we made it were strange… We didn’t know there was gonna be a merger till we finished shooting.” 

Trilogy plans sound as though they were storming ahead, as Boone told Taylor-Joy that the third movie – which would adapt the beloved 1980s Inferno storyline – would see Magik transform into the Darkchilde, a demonic version of her character. “We told her that in the third movie, there would be two of her... and she’d have to play two sides of herself. We were hyped on it!” Excuse us while we mourn what might have been...

Here is everything we learned from The New Mutants SDCC pane – see it in cinemas (finally) August 28.