Are Marvel’s “New Mutants” Headed For The Big Screen?

Speaking with Twentieth Century Fox chairman Tom Rothman this week at Cinemacon in Las Vegas, website Collider got what seems like a juicy piece of info from him during a q&a. It all went down like this:

Collider: I know you guys have like The New Mutants and a lot of characters in the X-Menuniverse.  Obviously you guys are moving forward on an X-Men sequel, you’re moving forward on Wolverine, do you envision New Mutants or some of these other characters as franchises that the door can be open to?  It does seem to me that the superhero genre is bigger than it’s ever been, and you guys have some of the crown jewels.

Rothman: (smiles) Yes.

When can fans expect an announcement on some of these other properties?  Before Comic-Con, after Comic-Con, at Comic-Con?

Rothman:  In the summer.

Are you talking to filmmakers right now?

Rothman: Let me just say this.  All I have to say is, I agree with you in your assessment of the potential in a lot of these characters

Collider seems to think that Rothman’s big grin when The New Mutants was brought up is a heavy hint that they are getting a movie of their own, but I’m not sure. We already know that an X-Men: First Class sequel is coming, and two competing movies about young mutants in school seems redundant. I think far more likely that we’ll see some New Mutant characters like maybe Cannonball or Sunspot as students in X-Men: First Class 2. The X-Men movies play fast and loose with the timeline anyway.

Tom Rothman earned some goodwill last year with X-Men: First Class, but this is the man who nixed Sentinels in X2, a proper Galactus in Fantastic Four, and we all know what his idea of Deadpool was for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I’m not entirely sure he even knows what the New Mutants even are.