We don’t know when the New Mutants is going to hit theaters. After a year of assuming the movie would either get canned or pushed off to Hulu, it was set to come out this spring, but it has now been delayed (along with every other movie). Still, you’ve got to give Josh Boone’s mutant horror film some credit. It’s the little engine that could of the comic book world.

In a new interview with Empire, director Josh Boone sounds pretty confident about the success of New Mutants, in no small part to the low bar by the most recent X-Men film to hit theaters:

“Look, you can only go up after Dark Phoenix. That’s not to say anything bad about the people involved, but it was what it was. Honestly, I feel less pressure now than I did ahead of [the first slated release date]. Because we’ve tested our movie so many times, and audiences have loved it.”