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  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • Despite being Anglican, Rahne doesn't seem to have any problem with being romantically attracted to Dani. Notably, she confessed to masturbating in the chapel booth, a somewhat less serious sin in Catholicism.
    • Likewise, while three of the others angst about killing the people around them by accident, Dani never displays a reaction to the fact that she was the one who killed everyone on her reservation. Especially considering that she tried to commit suicide before the fact came to light.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Magik. Some consider her to be a racist, bigoted bully, while others say that she's the only character who was properly cast and the most memorable thing in the whole movie.
  • Captain Obvious Reveal:
    • Cecelia Reyes is the Big Bad, a position telegraphed as early as the first trailers. And for comic fans, the fact that her position gets hijacked by Demon Bear.
    • Also, the fact that Dani's mutant powers allow her to bring other people's worst fears to life. Not only is this common knowledge to anyone that's a fan of the comics (read: most people watching the movie), but even if you didn't know, you could guess almost immediately.
  • Fan Nickname: Due to the repeated delays on the movie and the subsequent inevitable X-Men reboot from Marvel Studios, the project has been jokingly called The Old Mutants.
  • The Firefly Effect: Like with Dark Phoenix, the Disney-Fox merger, and Fox's indication that there would be no sequels to make way for a total X-Men movie franchise reboot, dampened excitement for the project. However, the infamous delays to the project also paradoxically created interest in the film that wouldn't otherwise be there, so it has that over its predecessor.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Marilyn Manson is the voice of the Smiley Men who sexually abuse Illyana as a child. Come 2021, allegations of his abuse (including physical and sexual) of Evan Rachel Wood come to fruition.
  • Heartwarming Moments: Rahn telling Dani that she isn't scared or angry at her despite Dani's powers accidentally bringing back her worst fears to life and branding her a second time.
  • Memetic Mutation: Any mention of the movie, positive or otherwise, tends to get met with jokes about the infamous delays that have pushed the film back significantly. One promotional video even had a tongue-in-cheek reference to the delays by stating that "nothing will stop the New Mutants", and a later promo explicitly made light of the delays and the social media reaction to them. When the film was finally released on August 28th 2020, many joked that it was some kind of prank and the movie was still yet to be released. Even the movie’s final poster carried the tagline “Hell has frozen over”.
  • Older Than They Think: This isn't the first Marvel horror movie; that honor goes to 1998's Blade. However, this is the closest we will ever get to a traditional Haunted House horror movie made by Marvel Comics, while Blade was action-oriented and bordered a Martial Arts Movie.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Illyana's Adaptational Jerkass; note that while her character is typically a jerk in the comics, she has never been as casually racist as she is in the film, nor is her banter ever so mean-spirited (at best she's The Gadfly to her friends, but never an outright bully). There's also some discomfort with the decision to make her a survivor of child sex slavery, seemingly to disconnect her from her brother (who is the X-Man known as Colossus), especially as her backstory of being raised in Limbo was still on the table given Limbo's inclusion.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite the fact that she's both a founding member of the team and was originally The Leader, Xuân/Karma is completely absent from the film. It's especially glaring considering the changes made to Illyana's backstory (as Xuân's own Dark and Troubled Past involved her getting sexually assaulted by Ruthless Modern Pirates, so she could have easily been used instead) and Rahne and Dani getting hit with Adaptational Sexuality (why not use the New Mutant who's already canonically a lesbian)?
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: The general consensus among critics is that Maisie Williams and Anya Taylor-Joy are the only cast members who are desperately trying to give some depth to the shallow script.
  • Ugly Cute: Rahne’s midpoint between her wolf and human forms would have probably looked genuinely scary on anyone who wasn’t Maisie Williams.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Illyana, for some. She was clearly just meant to be an edgy badgirl who banters with Dani, but her choice to invoke Dani's Native American heritage with repeatedly racially-based insults just made her come off more as a bigoted bully.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite being a PG-13 movie, the dark trailer makes it very explicitly clear this film isn't for kids, unless they want to be traumatized by said film's horror imagery. They even made a "G-Rated trailer" in Taiwan with all jump-scares blurred out just to show parents how scary this film is. Child sex slavery and religious abuse are part of some of these characters' backstories.

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