How New Mutants Connects To X-Men: Apocalypse & Logan

Warning: SPOILERS ahead for The New Mutants.

Though it’s set far apart from the world of matching uniforms and invisible jets, Josh Boone’s long-awaited Marvel movie The New Mutants is rich with connections to X-Men: Apocalypse, Logan, and even Deadpool 2. With its release date having been delayed over and over again (the first trailer was released almost three years ago), The New Mutants is a relic of the over-arching plan that 20th Century Fox once had to build up Mr. Sinister as the next big bad of the X-Men franchise.

The film opens with Danielle Moonstar fleeing from some kind of monster that ends up killing her father and everyone else on her reservation. Dani wakes up handcuffed to a bed in a mysterious hospital where the only staff member is a woman called Dr. Reyes, who tells Dani that she and her fellow patients must stay there until they learn how to control their dangerous mutant powers.

Those fellow patients are the shape-shifting Rahne Sinclair (a.k.a. Wolfsbane), the magical sword-wielding Illyana Rasputin (a.k.a. Magik), “blast-off” boy Sam Guthrie (a.k.a. Cannonball), and the prone-to-overheating Roberto Da Costa (a.k.a. Sunspot). Though it at first seems like The New Mutants is telling a standalone story, it soon starts to connect to the rest of the X-Men franchise in some interesting ways.

The New Mutants References The X-Men

Dr. Reyes is careful with the information that she shares with her patients, but makes frequent references to “my superior” – a man who, she says, runs another facility for young mutants. According to Dr. Reyes, Dani and the other New Mutants are at Milbury Hospital for treatment to get their powers under control, and if they follow their treatment plans obediently they’ll get to move on to her superior’s facility. She also tells them that the mutants they now know as heroes were just once like them – young, untrained, and dangerous.

All of these hints lead the New Mutants to conclude that Dr. Reyes’ “superior” is Professor Xavier, and that the facility they’ll be moving on to once they leave is Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters. Those familiar with the world of the X-Men movies will immediately sense that there’s something not quite right about this, since Professor X has never insisted upon students reaching a minimum level of control before coming to his school. But for Dani and her fellow patients, it’s a glimmer of hope. After the conversation with Dr. Reyes they discuss the X-Men and what it would be like to join the famous mutant superhero team. But aside from this connection to the main franchise, The New Mutants is also linked to another standalone movie in Fox’s Marvel universe.

The New Mutants Features Footage From Logan

A surprising moment in The New Mutants reveals that Milbury Hospital is controlled by the same shadowy figures that created Laura and her fellow young mutants in Logan. While undergoing tests, Dani touches Dr. Reyes and experiences a vision of what the supposed doctor is hiding. She sees children in another facility being experimented upon and trained to use their mutant powers for combat. This “vision” is actually taken from the scene in Logan where Professor X and Wolverine watch footage secretly recorded by Laura’s nurse and rescuer, Gabriela.

Filmed inside the Transigen facility in Mexico, one of the most recognizable clips that returns in The New Mutants is a young telekinetic mutant being forced to use his powers on a mannequin, and then using them to throw the instructor across the room. Whether the implication is that the New Mutants will eventually be moved on to this facility in Mexico, or that they and the cloned mutants were ultimately destined for the same advanced training facility, Dani experiencing this vision bizarrely implies that Logan and The New Mutants are set at around the same time in the X-Men movies’ ever-more-confusing timeline.

Logan was explicitly set in 2029, but The New Mutants‘ technology is considerably more old-school. The kids watch DVD box sets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dr. Reyes’ computer and CCTV set-up looks like something out of the 1990s. One possible explanation is that Milbury Hospital is simply underfunded, and that Transigen’s genetically-engineered mutants who have been in institutions their whole lives are seen as higher-value than the wayward teens Dr. Reyes is charged with getting under control. However, that wouldn’t explain why the X-Men are still active in The New Mutants, when Logan establishes that they were almost entirely wiped out by the Westchester Incident. We may have to chalk this up to just another case of alternative branching timelines.

Dr. Reyes Works for Mr. Sinister & Essex Corp.

The common thread that ties The New Mutants, X-Men: Apocalypse, Logan, and Deadpool 2 together is Essex Corp. – the evil conglomerate run by Nathaniel Essex a.k.a. Mr. Sinister. Had The New Mutants arrived on its planned release date, all four of these movies would have been released consecutively (X-Men: Dark Phoenix, the last movie in the main saga, made no reference to Essex Corp. or Mr. Sinister). The long-awaited release of The New Mutants is therefore the final piece of a puzzle that shows Fox was building up Mr. Sinister as a Thanos-level mega-villain whose influence spanned the various X-Men franchises. This plan never came to fruition, since Fox and all its movie assets were acquired by Disney in 2019 and the X-Men are now set for a reboot to bring them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Dani and the other new mutants eventually learn that Dr. Reyes’ “superior” is not Professor X, and they’re not destined for a nice boarding school in Westchester. Though Mr. Sinister is never named, they discover that Dr. Reyes actually works for the Essex Corporation, and all of her notes on them are related to their suitability as killing machines. Dr. Reyes is particularly pleased by Illyana’s hatred of humanity, and sees a great deal of potential in her. Comic book readers may have seen this coming; Dr. Reyes wears a brooch with a diamond shape in it, as a nod to the diamonds on Mr. Sinister’s forehead and costume. Milbury Hospital is also named after one of Mr. Sinister’s aliases.

Within the movie universe, Essex Corp. was first featured in X-Men: Apocalypse‘s post-credits scene. While Alkali Lake’s long-suffering janitorial crew are cleaning up the mess left behind after Wolverine’s escape, a group of men in suits arrive to collect a vial of his blood (labelled “Weapon X”) and put it inside a briefcase with the name Essex Corp. on it. This was most likely intended as a more direct tease for Logan, explaining how Wolverine’s DNA was acquired and used to create a clone, but Logan made no mention of Essex Corp., referring only to Transigen and casting Dr. Zander Rice as the movie’s villain. Director James Mangold explained Mr. Sinister’s absence by saying that Logan was “trying to kind of take a step backward from that kind of spectacle” and have a more grounded feel than the other X-Men movies.

Deadpool 2 was also fairly detached from the main X-Men saga, but that movie had a Mr. Sinister tie-in as well. The orphanage that Firefist was being held at is called the Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation, and is yet another facility being run by Nathaniel Essex for the purposes of creating trained killer mutants. With the Transigen facility in Mexico, Essex House, and Milbury Hospital, it’s clear that Mr. Sinister had planted operations in many locations with the explicit purpose of studying and weaponizing children with mutant powers.

How The New Mutants Sets Up An X-Men Crossover

Between the X-Men rights being brought under the ever-expanding Disney umbrella and the poor box office resulting from The New Mutants finally being released two and a half years late (and in the middle of a pandemic), Boone’s movie is now destined to be a standalone story. But based on all the connections that it has to its would-be contemporaries in the X-Men franchise, it definitely seems like Fox wanted to set up a potential New Mutants/X-Men crossover in case Boone’s movie proved to be a hit. The New Mutants ends with Magik, Moonstar, Cannonball, Sunspot and Wolfsbane escaping the wreckage of Milbury Hospital and walking out into the world. Since they’re not safe in the real world (all of them have killed people, intentionally or otherwise) it seems only natural that they would seek out Professor Xavier and the sanctuary of his School For Gifted Youngsters.

In a way, The New Mutants already crossed over with the main X-Men franchise when Sunspot made an appearance in the future-set sequences of X-Men: Days of Future Past (played by Adan Canto). But had X-Men: Apocalypse been a bigger success than it was, and had The New Mutants released as planned to a better critical reception, the pieces would have been in place for the two movies’ worlds to collide. The former patients of Milbury Hospital could have been recruited to the X-Men (or at the very least, worked together with them), and Mr. Sinister could have finally emerged from the shadows as the main villain. Boone has said that he originally sold The New Mutants as a trilogy, with the second movie being about an alien invasion in Brazil and the third being a crossover with the main X-Men story.

Unfortunately, we’ll never get to see that crossover movie. But if our own world has alternate timelines that are as branching and confused as the X-Men movies’ timelines, perhaps an X-Men/New Mutants crossover exists somewhere out in the multiverse.

About The Author

Hannah Shaw-Williams
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Hannah has been with Screen Rant since 2013, covering news, features, movie premieres, Comic-Con and more! You can follow her on Twitter @HSW3K

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