As news is slowly beginning to circulate about X-Men: The New Mutants, the upcoming young adult-aimed spinoff of the core X-Men movies franchise.

The film is written and helmed by The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone. While Boone has teased possible the film’s possible cast of characters and show off cover pages for several drafts of the X-Men: The New Mutants script, it only in a recent interview with Creative Screenwriting that Boone spoke directly about how he came to control the future of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise.

“After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book,” Boone explains. “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 [producer] Simon [Kinberg] 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.”

Fox hasn’t publicly announced a release date for X-Men: The New Mutants, but there are several unclaimed Marvel movie dates on Fox’s schedule. Boone’s quote is also the first time it has been revealed that X-Men: The New Mutants is part of a planned trilogy of movies featuring the characters.

Boone mentioned that the comic book featured artwork from The New Mutants comic books that he and co-writer Knate Gwaltney loved. What comics would that be? Here’s a clue:

“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.”

Demon Bear is a kind of psychic entity who haunted original New Mutants member Dani Moonstar, aka Psyche and then Mirage. The story in which he first appeared is considered to be the point where The New Mutants really hit its stride as a series, both due to the darkened tone and Sienkiewicz’s unique and expressive art.

With production on X-Men: The New Mutants rumored to begin in May 2017, it should only be a matter of time before 20th Century Fox begins making some official casting announcements.

More X-Men Movie Universe News: New Mutants Production Start Date / Deadpool 2 Production Start Date / Legion Aubrey Plaza Teaser / Legion Trailer

[H/T] Geek Tyrant