Everyone is wondering when it will be safe to go back to movie theaters, or, in some markets (like here in NYC), when theaters will reopen at all? Vanity Fair sent Richard Larson to his home town of Boston for a wonderfully evocative piece about returning to the movie theater... for The New Mutants of all things. That Fox movie's long troubled voyage to cinemas has been well documented on the internet and Vulture recently tried to sum it all up, if you haven't been following along.
I was an avid reader of comic books when The New Mutants first emerged (September 1982) and I gobbled that book right up...
My own interest in the movie was never high given though for three reasons.
1. The X-Men films have largely been disappointing, never really grasping what made the comic books so special
2. They ditched my favourite character, Karma, a Vietnamese girl who could possess people
3. The casting was not inspiring* but especially the white-washing of Sunspot, an Afro-Brazilian in the comics**, and the fact that Charlie Heaton, who is good on Stranger Things, looks exactly nothing like his comic book counterpart, Cannonball, a tall lanky blonde.
* With the exception of Anya Taylor-Joy, who is about as good a casting of Magik, looks-wise, as is imaginable though Magik wasn't in the first year or so of the comic books.
** Sunspot also appeared in X-Men Days of Future Past, where he was played by a Mexican actor, so basically the X-franchise keeps ignoring that he's black and that his dark skin is part of his origin story in the comic-books.
Weekend Box Office
- New Mutants $7 *new*
- Unhinged $2.6 (cumulative $8.8)
- Bill & Ted Face the Music $1 *new*
- Spongebob: Sponge on the Run $604k (cumulative $2)
- Personal History of David Copperfield $520k *new*
Are movie theaters reopening where you live? What did you see this weekend at home?