Ever since X-Men: Apocalypse closed out the X-Men prequel trilogy, fans have been left somewhat in the dark about 20th Century Fox's future plans for the franchise. The studio is developing The New Mutants along with X-Force and Gambit spin-offs, while rumors persist that Bryan Singer is shooting another X-Men movie next year, which may or may not be a reboot of the Dark Phoenix saga, which was told in X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand. Producer Simon Kinberg has also said that the next X-Men movie is set in the 1990s, but he hasn't said which movie that may be. While we wait to sort out the future of this franchise, The New Mutants director Josh Boone has confirmed that his film will start a trilogy.

We reported in November that writer-director Josh Boone has the script ready to go, and that he plans to shoot the film in the spring of 2017. Creative Screenwriting caught up with the filmmaker, where he revealed how he and co-writer Knate Gwaltney discovered the comics as kids. The filmmaker also teased that there is a release date in place for The New Mutants, although it hasn't been announced yet. Here's what he had to say below, confirming how the project came together, that it's now a trilogy and even teasing who the villain may be.

"Co-writer Knate Gwaltney (who wrote and directed a movie titled Cardboard Boxer and wrote a movie titled Kidnap starring Halle Berry that will come out in 2017) is my best friend - I've known him since the day I was born, because our moms are best friends and we grew up together in Virginia. We had a comic book company when we were kids. We would draw comics, staple them together, and then sell them to our uncles or whomever. And we were always obsessed with Marvel Comics through the 1980s, long before there was a Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie. We had loved this X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants. We had loved Bill Sienkiewicz's run with Chris Claremont that had Demon Bear. It was really dark, interesting, and different from the typical X-Men stories that we had read. After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book. It walked them through a trilogy of New Mutant films that would build on each other. We used this program called Comic Life, and took all the images we had loved from the series and strung them together to show them the movie we wanted to do. We brought it to Simon and he really liked it. We've been going for the past year and a half to get it ready, and I'm about to go location scout and we have a release date now."

This is the first we're hearing about a release date for The New Mutants, and the possible involvement of Demon Bear as the villain. In the Marvel comics, Demon Bear was created by mutating William and Peg Lonestar. The Demon Bear haunted the dreams of their daughter Danielle Moonstar, claiming he had killed her parents and would eventually come and kill her. Back in May, Josh Boone took to Instagram to reveal which New Mutants characters will be used in this film. The characters revealed were Magik, Wolfsbane, Dani Moonstar, Cannonball, Sunspot and Warlock. An unconfirmed rumor surfaced in March that claimed Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams will play Wolfsbane, a.k.a. Rahne Sinclair, with The Witch star Anya Taylor-Joy reportedly signing on to play Magik, a.k.a. Illya Rasputin, the younger sister of Colossus. That report also claimed that X-Men: Apocalypse star Alexandra Shipp will return as Storm, with Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler) also being eyed to return. The filmmaker added that he also brought in Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber to work on the script, which he doesn't think will ever be fully finished until filming has wrapped.

"New Mutants is different - when you work with a studio, you're not in a bubble. The process of writing becomes a much different thing because you have so many people who have an opinion since the movie is so expensive. It's a balance of getting to do things in a bubble, which I'd say is the best way of writing anything, and then having to negotiate all the politics of studio filmmaking, which is its own special beast. With New Mutants, we wrote a few drafts, and I brought in Scott Neustadter and Mike Weber, who are the friends of mine that adapted The Fault in Our Stars, to do a draft while we did something else. My guess is that it will never be done until we're done shooting! It's a different experience, because on my last two movies I went into shooting them with very locked scripts. I knew every beat of what they were going to be. This has been different because it's constantly morphed as we've gone along. It will probably continue to morph as we're making it."

If production does in fact start sometime next year, it's possible that 20th Century Fox could be eyeing a summer 2018 release date for The New Mutants, but that hasn't been announced by the studio yet. Perhaps we'll get an official announcement soon, along with the first casting details. Regardless of when it comes out, The New Mutants is certainly shaping up to be a highly-anticipated superhero adventure.