The New Mutants: New Photo Reveals Mirage’s Powers

The New Mutants may be delayed (again) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but fans can still get a new look at the new (final?) installment of the X-Men movies series. 20th Century Studios revealed a new photo (via Empire) that shows Mirage making use of her mutant powers. You can take a look at the photo yourself below. Blu Hunt plays Mirage, aka Danielle Moonstar, in the film. Mirage is a Native American hero, a rarity in superhero movies. Hunt is Lakota and spoke to Empire about what it means to represent her indigenous heritage on the big screen.

“I’m an indigenous superhero,” Hunt says. She goes on to say that it is “an honor,” noting that “I’m not just in the background, to please people. I’m carrying the movie.”

As for finally seeing the movie finished, she says “It was overwhelming. I never thought I’d see myself in a movie, and the first shot is of my face! I was shaking in the theatre, but Maisie [Williams] grabbed me, like, ‘You’re good! It’s good!’”

Mirage is integral to the plot of the film, which is inspired by the classic comic book story “The Demon Bears Saga.” Mirage has illusionary powers that bring about the Demon Bear. The Demon Bear hunts Dani and when he catches up with her, the New Mutants come together to defend their friend.

“We’ve changed stuff, we’ve really taken the characters we love from the comics and put them into our version of the movie because, if you just did it, it’d just be another X-Men movie,” director Josh Boone said in an interview. “I just knew we always wanted to do the Demon Bear story, Knate [Lee] and I, my co-writer… And when we went to go tell Fox we wanted to do this movie, we made them a comic book, it was like a PDF that pitched them kind of a trilogy of films, each one’s its own unique kind of horror movie, the first one’s a supernatural horror movie.”

In 2016, The New Mutants Boone went further into the process of how he pitched The New Mutants as a trilogy beginning with “The Demon Bear Saga.” He said, “After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book. It walked them through a trilogy of New Mutants films that would build on each other. We used this program called Comic Life, and took all the images we had loved from the series and strung them together to show them the movie we wanted to do. We brought it to [producer] Simon [Kinberg] and he really liked it. We’ve been going for the past year and a half to get it ready, and I’m about to go location scout and we have a release date now.

“We had loved this X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants. We had loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s run with Chris Claremont that had Demon Bear. It was really dark, interesting, and different from the typical X-Men stories that we had read.”