They eventually opted not to screen the movie for critics ahead of its August 28 arrival as one of the first major-studio entrées to hit theaters post-lockdown and the lone superhero event title in this Summer of No Blockbusters. Fox (the studio that produced the title in conjunction with intellectual-property holder Marvel) and Disney (its media-behemoth inheritor in last year’s $71.3 billion Hollywood megamerger) didn’t exactly do much to spark optimism in the film’s commerciality over New Mutants’ three years in distribution hell. In normal, non-novel-coronavirus times, a studio wouldn’t generally push a movie with a fair-to-middling shot at making money from its release date so many times. The horror-skewing project, directed by Fault in Our Stars filmmaker Josh Boone, was originally slated to hit theaters in 2018 but was delayed again and again and again and again. Somehow, the X-Men spinoff The New Mutants has managed to sustain prerelease buzz ever since its first teaser trailer dropped all the way back in 2017 - though audience awareness has mostly kept pace because of the movie’s superhuman ability to elude release.