The road to the release of the Marvel Comics adaptation The New Mutants has been a long one, but we may finally be close – and the film’s co-writer and director Josh Boone already has ambitious plans for two sequels, as he told Collider in a recent interview.

The New Mutants started filming back in the summer of 2017 as a 20th Century Fox film, and the idea was for this movie to be a horror-tinged X-Men spinoff with a young cast. Indeed, the story finds young mutants like Wolfsbane (Maisie Williams), Magik (Anya Taylor-Joy), Cannoball (Charlie Heaton), Mirage (Blu Hunt), and Sunspot (Henry Zaga) being held in a secret facility against their will as they discover their new abilities.

After the film wrapped, Fox delayed the movie’s release while they considered reshoots to amp up some of the horror aspects of the movie. Those reshoots never materialized, however, as Fox entered negotiations to be bought out by Disney. When that sale did happen, Disney had to take time to assess all the movies that were in the can and in development at Fox and figure out how it fit into their own slate, hence more delays.

Disney finally set a New Mutants release date for April 2020, but that was scrapped due to the COVID-19 shutdown. The film is complete and ready for release, and Boone and the cast have all said they’re pleased with the finished product, but we continue to wait to actually see this thing.

But when Boone was making New Mutants – with the understanding that it would hopefully kick off a new franchise at Fox under the X-Men umbrella – he formulated ideas for sequels. Indeed, he’s previously revealed that the second New Mutants movie would take place in Brazil and star Antonio Banderas, so when Collider’s own Steve Weintraub spoke with Boone and the cast recently for an interview, he asked Boone about sequel plans. The filmmaker not only confirmed that The New Mutants 2 would bring characters Warlock and Karma into the fold, but revealed that the third movie would adapt the Inferno comics storyline:

“I think everybody just needs to see what happens with this one, see if it catches on or not. But we did always have a plan to do a second movie set in Brazil but it’d be Warlock and Karma introduced, and then a third one that utilized the Inferno crossover series from X-Men in the 90s which was one of my favorites growing up, that I thought was in the same tonal ballpark as doing horror stuff in each one. Each one was sort of a different horror movie – the second was gonna be an alien invasion movie and then the third one was gonna be like a Magik, Anya [Taylor-Joy]-related Inferno one. We were ambitious in our minds.”

Indeed, that Inferno comics storyline finds two demons from Limbo planning an invasion of Earth using the powers of Anya Taylor-Joy’s character Magik. A horror-tinged superhero movie with demons instead of aliens? Sign me up.

We’ll have to wait and see if Disney and Marvel Studios have any interest in continuing on the New Mutants franchise at all, let alone with Boone’s hopeful plans. As the filmmaker said, he hasn’t had any discussions with the studio at this point about a potential sequel, and fans know that Marvel Studios plans out its various films years in advance. Slotting in a New Mutants trilogy that would have major ramifications for the MCU at large may not fit with what they have on deck.

All will be revealed in due time. For now, you can watch the opening of New Mutants here, and check out Boone discussing the film's runtime.