As the production of director Josh Boone's long-awaited The New Mutants prepares for extensive reshoots this summer, it appears as if Fox's X-Men spinoff will lean hard into terror.

The film, which debuted a trailer in October, was initially targeted to arrive in theaters this week, but its release date was pushed back first to February 2019 and then to Aug. 2, 2019, to play up its horror elements and add another character. It's been rumored that as much of 50 percent of the feature could be reshot.

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Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton, who plays Cannonball in The New Mutants, has confirmed the emphasis on horror.

"It’s a story about these characters coming to grips with who they are and it’s a horror X-Men movie, which we haven’t seen before. I feel like, for an X-Men movie, yeah, I think they’re going full-fledged horror," he told Entertainment Weekly. "Without saying too much — I really don’t want to give away too much what it’s about, it’s very under wraps — but it is, in terms of anything we’ve seen in the X-Men world, it definitely is a horror film. It’s scarier than anything we’ve seen in that genre."

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The film is expected to draw inspiration from Marvel Comics' seminal "Demon Bear Saga," by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, although the setting and some of the characters are changed, with the New Mutants as patients at a mysterious institution, rather than students at Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

Arriving Feb. 22, 2019, The New Mutants stars Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) as Wolfsbane, Anya Taylor-Joy (Atlantis) as Magik, Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) as Cannonball, Blu Hunt (The Originals) as Dani Moonstar and Henry Zaga (13 Reasons Why) as Sunspot.