New Mutants Is Big Hit On VOD

While The New Mutants wasn’t exactly a hit at the box office or with critics, the film is catching significant traction through video on demand. The movie, a horror-styled spinoff of Fox’s X-Men franchise, suffered some production hiccups in the wake of Disney’s acquisition of the company and a curtailed theatrical performance due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now, it seems like the film is finding a renewed interest through digital viewings.

The New Mutants was the last X-Men-adjacent film developed by Fox and released by Disney after the acquisition. Filming was conducted in 2017 with a planned release in 2018, but the Disney purchase led to a series of delays and plans for reshoots that ultimately never took place. After a tumultuous few years, the movie was released to a mediocre reception earlier this year, exacerbated by the spread of covid-19. The New Mutants only grossed $45 million worldwide.

Now though, a new wave of interest has sparked around The New Mutants on video-on-demand services. Per Bleeding Cool, the movie topped lists on both Vudu and FandangoNOW as the number-one film, based on revenue. That’s a big win for a film that many, even in the comic fan space, wrote off as a lost cause. While no amount of rental attention can change the content of a movie that’s still generally seen as mediocre in quality, The New Mutant’s popularity on VOD could indicate a level of cult-hit success in the future.

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For some, The New Mutants may hold allure only as the final relic of an era when Disney didn’t own the X-Men. While the films and Dark Phoenix didn’t exactly close out Fox’s series in widely-praised fashion, the franchise as a whole always offered a weirder, less-polished, more experimental alternative to the MCU and DCEU. Standout films like Logan, X-Men: First Class, and the Deadpool movies received high praise for individual merit and daring to be different in a mostly homogeneous genre.

Now that Disney owns the property and its vast array of characters, it remains to be seen how they will be introduced to the existing MCU. Marvel has taken a bit of a hiatus from their previously rigorous film release schedule, both because of covid-related delays and because of a heightened focus on Disney+ content in the wake of the Infinity Saga’s conclusion. Incorporating features of the X-Men universe might be precisely what the franchise needs to renew its cultural presence in the future, but fans will have to wait a bit longer to see how that plays out. In the meantime, they can catch The New Mutants on video on demand. It seems that many of them already have.