#The New Mutants Director Wanted Sacha Baron Cohen as Warlock

The struggle to get The New Mutants to the big screen has been a long, arduous one. With the movie finally set to be released later this month, details about where the franchise would have gone had it been released under better circumstances are beginning to drip through. According to a new report, The New Mutants’ director Josh Boone initially wanted Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan star Sacha Baron Cohen to appear in the movie as the character, Warlock.

The report states that the idea was to have the comedic actor essentially be the “Andy Serkis of Warlock,” with the intention being for the actor to perform using motion capture technology similar to that used by Andy Serkis as Gollum in Lord of the Rings and as Caesar in the most recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Ultimately, the characters inclusion was scrapped due to budget constraints, with director Josh Boone forced to choose between using Warlock or the Demon Bear.

The New Mutants character, Warlock, is an alien being who hails from an unidentified world in an unspecified location in outer space. Warlock’s race is a sentient form of “techno-organic” life, which resembles circuitry and machinery in various ways. The character is an eccentric one, with the mind of child, and the casting of Cohen in the role, an actor best known for his comedic roles in the likes of Borat, Ali G, and Madagascar, would certainly have been an inspired one and a welcome addition to the ensemble.

This is not the first time that Josh Boone has discussed his intentions of using Warlock in The New Mutants, with the director recently laying out his plan for a proposed trilogy. “So our plan was always to have Warlock come back in the next one and try to tell his story then.,” he said of using The New Mutants character. “They were all supposed to be kind of separate horror genre films: the first one’s like a rubber reality horror movie, the second one was supposed to be an alien invasion movie with Warlock, and then the third one was going to take all these elements from the X-Men crossover from the late ’80s and early ’90s called Inferno to be a kind of supernatural, apocalyptic horror movie. That was the plan.”

Boone’s plans for a trilogy involving Warlock and an all-out alien invasion sound like they would have resulted in an exciting comic book movie franchise. Sadly, due to the purchase of Fox by Disney, as well as the continuous delays, it is highly unlikely we will ever see it come to fruition. Boone is directing the movie from a screenplay he wrote with Knate Lee. The New Mutants stars Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Alice Braga, Blu Hunt, and Henry Zaga, and follows five young mutants, with each discovering their abilities while being held in a secret facility against their will. They must band together and fight to escape their past sins and save themselves.

Following a series of delays, The New Mutants is now scheduled to be released in the United States on August 28, 2020. The movie was originally intended for release way back in April 2018 and has had several additional release dates since it was first announced. This news comes to us courtesy of Nerdist.

Topics: The New Mutants, X-Men