The New Mutants Comic-Con@Home panel reveals the first scene of the long-delayed X-Men film

It’s been a long road for the oft-delayed X-Men movie from writer/director Josh Boone, but The New Mutants are finally heading to the big screen. Really! They’ve got a San Diego Comic-Con@Home panel (poking fun at the delays) and everything!

After getting caught in the Disney/Fox acquisition shuffle (and subsequent superhero universe reassessment), the mutant film’s helmer and cast members — including Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Alice Braga, Blu Hunt, and Henry Zaga — stopped to chat about what fans can expect from their spooky coming-of-age superhero fest. And, at the end of the panel, they showed off the entire first scene of the movie!

Skip ahead to about 24 minutes into the YouTube video to get straight to the scene, or watch the full panel below:

"There's an old Native American proverb that says inside every person, there are two bears," an opening narration begins. "Forever locked in combat for your soul. One bear is all things good: love, trust. The other? All things evil: fear, shame, and self-destruction."

The action kicks off immediately afterward, with a building — no, a town — getting torn apart by what seems to be a storm. Since it's an X-Men film, and audiences hear a growl, it's probably not a storm, and in this case, it's probably not Storm, either. The sequence ends at the asylum that will serve as the film's setting — and transitions straight into a trailer.

Featuring the likes of Wolfsbane, Mirage, and more comic favorites escaping a sanitarium — and drawing from the legendary New Mutants run “Demon Bear” (New Mutants #18-21) from artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who also stopped by the panel — the movie has been promising a new kind of X-Men film since its first trailer dropped back in 2017.

Boone also went deep on his (now shelved) plans for a trilogy before things got...complicated for New Mutants. “I think everybody just needs to see what happens with this one, see if it catches on or not," he said. "But we did always have a plan to do a second movie set in Brazil but it’d be Warlock and Karma introduced, and then a third one that utilized the Inferno crossover series from X-Men in the '90s which was one of my favorites growing up, that I thought was in the same tonal ballpark as doing horror stuff in each one. Each one was sort of a different horror movie – the second was gonna be an alien invasion movie and then the third one was gonna be like a Magik, Anya [Taylor-Joy]-related Inferno one.”

The cast discussed various aspects of the filming process, like Zaga's buffing up and Williams' chemistry reads with various actresses for her love interest. Some of these details will find their way onto future home releases. "We've got a bunch of deleted scenes there and one of them is you guys playing basketball," Boone said of Zaga's physical transformation.

"I remember going up to you and you being like 'I haven't drinken water all day,' and me being like 'Why wouldn't you drink water?'" Zaga's response? He had to "look amazing" with his shirt off. Boone laughed that he said, "he would never tell you not to drink water, go drink water right now." "He did look amazing, though," Heaton chimed in.

Williams had a more positive, less potentially dangerous time of things. "From the first audition that we did together, we got on so well," she said of Hunt, who plays Danielle Moonstar. "It was so wonderful to see a relationship like this in the typically masculine world of superheroes. It was lovely to see these two fragile women that protect one another and bring light to one another." Boone said that the screen test between the pair - where they needed to actually kiss to see how their relationship read on-camera - would also be an extra for the film's home release.

The panel also offered fans a chance to see an advanced screening of the film ("Wear a mask!" Boone says) by entering a contest using the hashtags "#NewMutantsComicConAtHome and #NewMutantsScreeningSweepstakes."

The New Mutants is finally scheduled to hit theaters (fingers crossed!) on Aug. 28.

Click here for SYFY WIRE's full coverage of Comic-Con@Home 2020.