The New Mutants is the most recent installment in the X-Men movie franchise that saw teenage mutants undergoing treatments to “cure” them of their powers. While undergoing the treatments, each teen shares their stories, but their memories become horrifying realities. The group begins to wonder what is happening and who exactly is trying to strip them of their powers. Starring young up-and-comers like Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Charlie Heaton, The New Mutants brought a new perspective to the X-Men franchise. However, a new perspective, for many, didn’t mean a better one.

Indeed, The New Mutants was poorly received overall, bombing at the box-office and receiving mixed-negative reviews upon release. The film did so poorly that, per Comicbook.com, all potential sequels announced by Josh Boone were consequently canceled. While The New Mutants has become one of the most universally disliked films within Marvel’s entire filmography, it is not as bad as everyone thinks it is. With a unique horror approach to the superhero genre, The New Mutants is a distinct film that does in fact have some good aspects to it. Here’s why The New Mutants wasn’t really the worst Marvel movie ever made.

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Lack of Apocalyptic Threat Allows For Greater Focus on Character

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While a number of fans disliked that fact that the stakes were small compared to world-ending threats like in Avengers: Endgame, there are some benefits to telling a smaller-scale story. Throughout The New Mutants, the threats that are detected seem to be like a low hum in the background, growing louder and louder as the film goes on. This allows for the film to focus on character development and building relationships between the main characters as the threat looms overhead. The lack of a world-ending, apocalyptic threat was a big reason that the film flopped at the box-office, making The New Mutants a rather unorthodox superhero film that doesn’t fit the cut and dry formula Marvel fans are accustomed to.

Strong Women Representation

While Marvel movies have been focused on increasing the amount of women representation, studio execs have still been criticized for the representation lacking true substance to the characters. The New Mutants brought a new level of depth to its women characters that previous films have seemed to lack. Before Captain Marvel, no heroines in the Marvel movie world received their own solo film, with Marvel choosing to keep women characters on the sidelines, either as supporting characters, romantic interests, or plot devices. The New Mutants showed greater interest in developing the women cast members’ characters rather than simply having them be present. This does more to please the women audience and is a step forward from previous depictions of superheroines.

Fantastic Plot Twist

While most superheros films feature some twist within them to keep the audience on their toes, a proper plot twist can be a real challenge for some filmmakers. As the five teens in The New Mutants are trying to figure out why things at the institution are so freaky, many viewers feared that the twist would be as predictable as figuring out that Moonstar’s power to bring nightmares to life is what is causing all the weird occurrences. This is a part of the film, but this twist is minor in comparison to the twist that was a genuine surprise to most audience members. Fortunately, this is a big redeeming factor for many Marvel fans as a truly shocking plot twist is quite difficult to achieve and despite all its faults, The New Mutants has managed to achieve just that.

Improvement Upon Dark Phoenix

Before The New Mutants was Dark Phoenix, which was meant to bring the X-Men franchise to a close, but the film was criticized for being an underwhelming bore, considering its predecessors. The fans expected more from Dark Phoenix as it was meant to send off a near 20-year legacy of X-Men content, and The New Mutants is certainly an improvement upon Dark Phoenix. Not only is The New Mutants more entertaining, having better overall content, but the film’s focus on young mutants allows for the new characters to be more relatable to the new generation of Marvel fans. While it’s not much to say that The New Mutants is better than Dark Phoenix, it is still an accomplishment.