Outliers · Adjacent
The New Mutants
A horror-tinged coda, delayed for years and released into a franchise that had already ended.
Nothing after the credits
Availability changes by country and by week, so this searches JustWatch rather than guessing.
Can you skip The New Mutants?
Yes, on a first watch. It is self-contained, and nothing in the main X-Men story depends on it. There is nothing after the credits to catch up on either. In chronological order, reaching it takes about 12h 9m of essential viewing across 6 titles. Show only the X-Men essentials.
Skippable, and it is the last film of the Fox run, released into circumstances that guaranteed nobody would see it. It was shot in 2017, delayed repeatedly, overtaken by the Disney acquisition, and finally put into cinemas in August 2020, when most of them were shut.
The pitch was a horror film: five teenage mutants held in a facility that is not a hospital, each haunted by a manifestation of their worst memory, discovering that the institution has no intention of releasing them. That is a strong premise and the first half hour delivers it, with long corridors, a locked ward and a doctor whose explanations do not add up.
What reached the screen is not that film. Reshoots intended to make it more frightening were planned and never happened, so the horror is largely implied, and the last act is a creature attacking a building. At ninety-four minutes it is the shortest here and visibly truncated.
The cast is the reason to be sorry about it. Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams and Blu Hunt are all good, and the relationship between two of them is handled with more care than the plot around it. Nothing references it, nothing requires it, and it is the quietest possible ending to twenty years.
X-Men guides
Where it sits in the X-Men order
- Release order
- #13 of 13
- Chronological order
- #12 of 13
- Released
- 28 August 2020
- In-universe era
- The Merc Era
What to watch next
In release order
Last in this order
In chronological order