Rosario Dawson has had quite an impact on superhero TV and movies, with her character Claire Temple providing the connective tissue for The Defenders‘ solo series (as well as simply being one of the Marvel Netflix universe’s best characters), and she also appeared in The LEGO Batman Movie as Barbara Gordon. However, it turns out that she won’t be adding the X-Men to her list after all.
THR reports that Dawson has dropped out of Josh Boone’s X-Men: The New Mutants, and that she has been replaced by the also-excellent Alice Braga. Braga will step into the role of “Dr. Cecilia Reyes, a medical doctor who has the ability to generate a protective bio-field around herself but also has more going on than she lets on.”
Boone has hyped his X movie as being the first horror-thriller film in this universe, and it “will tell of five diverse teens learning to cope with their superpowers who must escape a secret facility where they are being held against their will.” By all accounts Fox is keen to establish different tones for their various X-Men movies having had so much success with the R-rated gory comedy of Deadpool and the R-rated bleak, bleak violence of Logan.
Braga has a good deal of genre experience, having starred in Predators, Elysium, Repo Men, Blindness, The Rite and I Am Legend. She broke out in the early 00s with City Of God and Lower City, and she’s currently starring in the acclaimed series Queen Of The South.
She joins the previously cast Anya Taylor-Joy (Magik), Maisie Williams (Wolfsbane), Charlie Heaton (Cannonball), Henry Zaga (Sunspot) and Blu Hunt (Moonstar) in the film, which was written by Boone and Knate Lee, and which will shoot in Boston in July.
The New Mutants will be released on 13 April 2018. Keep up with the latest genre news with the new issue of SciFiNow.
