Do heroes and horror go together?

FOX will ask this very question next April with the release of the 11th X-Men movie, The New Mutants. The newest movie in the X-Men lineup will be directed by Josh Boone, who also directed The Fault in Our Stars. This will be the first horror movie in the X-Men franchise. The trailer shows an X-Men film different from any other entry in the franchise which could lead to a loss in viewers.

Comic book horror movies, although rare, aren’t unheard of. The most famous and successful examples are the Blade and Hellboy franchises.

The Blade trilogy stars Wesley Snipes as the vampire-hunting title character. The movies were successful at the box office for their low budget and were well-received by fans. However, the underwhelming level of success for the third movie spelled an end for the franchise.

On the other hand, the Hellboy franchise consisted of two movies starring Ron Pearlman, a red monster created by the Nazis during WWII. Neither of the films had the success that the original Blade movie had at the box office, but they both outdid the vampire slayer in reviews.

Despite these notable examples, The New Mutants isn’t guaranteed a successful run at the box office, or in the minds of movie reviewers. This is mostly because the X-Men is an already established franchise.

X-Men movies have been around for nearly two decades.  Each of the films in the series has been a financial success, likely due to the avid number of fans of the comic series. However, the franchise has developed a formula over the years that they have rarely broken.

Each of the team movies has featured the X-Men fighting a mix of human and mutant threats and, when Wolverine is in the movie, a Wolverine subplot. The times they’ve broken this model are in Deadpool and Logan, the only two R-rated X-Men movies. But these characters have both been in prior movies and have avid fan followings, whereas the New Mutants haven’t.

The New Mutants is a group of teenagers with dangerous powers that they don’t know how to control very well. Members of the team include heroes like Magik (Anya Taylor-Joy), Wolfsbane (Maisie Williams), and Cannonball (Charlie Heaton). In this movie, the team finds themselves trapped in a hospital for mutants and try to escape the “haunted house,” as one team member calls it, while escaping the clutches of presumably evil Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga).

While changing the basic X-Men formula is a risk, making it a different genre altogether is a much bigger one. The trailer makes the movie look like a typical horror movie with little mention of anything that a fan of the franchise could recognize. With more mentions of words like “haunted house” and “fear” than “mutant,” the movie seems to have little to no comic book connections despite the characters who star in it.

Moderate fans could end up avoiding the film because they might not enjoy horror movies, but devoted fans are being given the option of checking out something new. Since moderate horror fans may not watch the movie because they’re not caught-up on X-Men movies or they hate comic book movies altogether, this leaves the very devoted fans of comics, the devoted fans of horror, and the rare hybrid of fans who enjoy both genres. Overall, the fan base ight be just too small for the movie to turn much of a profit.

The New Mutants comes out on April 13th, 2018.