The New Mutants

As someone who had been watching a lot of superhero movies at the time, the idea of a superhero horror movie sounded interesting to me when I learned of The New Mutants, one of Fox’s later installments in the X-Men film series. However, while the quality of Dark Phoenix had nothing to do with Disney’s acquisition of Fox, The New Mutants unfortunately did, which resulted in it being the last of the X-Men films to be released. Although production went smoothly for an April 2018 release, things got a bit dicey when the merger occurred, with planned reshoots being continually delayed until the film was declared complete without any having been done at all. On top of this, the COVID-19 pandemic affected distribution plans, with Disney initially planning on a streaming release before changing their minds and finally giving it a theatrical run in August 2020. As it stands, while the final product is surprisingly decent considering the circumstances, it serves as an example of what can happen when your project becomes a crossfire victim of a corporate merger.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Note: This review contains spoilers for Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

Whether or not you’re familiar with middle grade fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Percy Jackson & the Olympians, a novel series by Rick Riordan about a young demigod named Percy Jackson. The series proved popular enough that a film based on the first book, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (The Lightning Thief), was released in 2010. The film, directed by Chris Columbus, did well at the box office, but was criticized, even by the author, for the way it deviated from the source material. It was actually around when the film released that I first became aware of Percy Jackson, although I didn’t do anything with that knowledge at the time because both the Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events series had reached their end around that time and I thought I had outgrown middle grade fiction. As an adult, however, when I rediscovered the joy of reading middle grade fiction, I finally dipped my toe into Percy Jackson and read the first book in time for the Disney+ adaptation, which I enjoyed. Afterwards, I decided to try watching the film just to see how badly it had apparently handled the same material. By the end, I realized that my past self was right in not watching it.