The New Mutants, starring Anglo fave Maisie Williams, has been in the works for three years, give or take. It now has a release date (August 28) and new trailer. 

It does make one wonder what took so long. But, now that it's here, we were ready to take it for what it is and move on. Even so, The New Mutants writer-director Josh Boone has addressed the delays.

In an interview with Slash Film, he pointed out that there were some concerns about 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse and those issues were taken into consideration when moving forward with his X-Men spinoff.

He started off the interview, saying, "They really did want it to be different than other stuff. They really pushed us to keep it separate from X-Men stuff, even though it’s set in the X-Men universe."

It's not clear who he means by "they," but we suppose it's a placeholder for the powers that be, aka the moviemaking machine.

Boone went on to describe the writing process, saying, "We had early drafts that were supposed to be in the same timeline as X-Men: Apocalypse, so it was originally going to be set in the ’80s. Originally, Professor X and Storm were in it, and Storm very much played the Alice Braga role (Dr. Cecilia Reyes)."

He didn't stop there, going on to explain a reshuffling in management and thoughts on earlier projects: "Over the course of months, a new studio head came in, they said they didn’t want any X-Men movies to take place in the past anymore, as if that was the reason that Apocalypse was bad (he laughs)."

Yikes! What does he really think? Boone does not hold back.

He and his team went back to the script, saying, "So we were put in the position where we kind of rewrote it to be set now in a nebulous [point in time], because nobody knew how the movies had turned out. Dark Phoenix wasn’t out yet. Yeah, it’s there, they talk about Professor X and those things, but it doesn’t have cameos from anyone or anything like that."

In addition to Maisie Williams as Wolfsbane, we can look for Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma.) as Magik, Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) as Cannonball, Henry Zaga (The Stand) as Sunspot and Blu Hunt (The Originals) as Mirage.

At first it seemed The New Mutants would quietly make its way back on the release schedule. And now, it's not so quiet, as Boone seems to have put it on blast.

Do you think Boone's comments will result in The New Mutants being scrutinized?