It’s been a long road for The New Mutants, but the final X-Men movie from the era of 20th Century Studios is finally ready to premiere in just a couple of months. After numerous delays, rumors of reshoots and rewrites, and a possible release on Hulu, filmmaker Josh Boone is getting the chance to unleash the movie he always intended to make upon the world. The movie will see the titular team of Marvel heroes coming together under dire circumstances as they face a powerful threat that with the ability to drive them to the brink of madness.
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The New Mutants will feature a classic comic book villain known as the Demon Bear, a popular foe from the X-Men comics that has plagued the team of young mutants on numerous occasions. Now we know that one character in particular will have a major connection with this entity, as revealed by new photos from the movie.
20th Century Studios released new photos featuring actress Blu Hunt as the telepathic mutant Dani Moonstar. One of the photos shows that she wears a pendant of a bear, a clear indication that the magical entity has a tie to Dani’s past.
It looks like The New Mutants is taking a major page straight from Marvel Comics, as Dani’s own origin story is deeply intertwined with that of the Demon Bear. The entity goes on to become young team’s first major threat and one of their most iconic enemies, resurfacing from time to time over the last few decades.
Boone revealed the film’s influences from the classic New Mutants comics during a set visit with the press, explaining that Demon Bear was planned from the beginning.
“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,” Boone said. “I just knew we always wanted to do the Demon Bear story, Knate [Lee] and I, my co-writer.”
He added, “We’ve loved comics our whole life, and we love more than anything Marvel Comics, especially X-Men stuff and Spider-Man stuff and stuff like that. We like DC, but only like when Dark Knight Returns came out we read the graphic novel, we read Watchmen, we loved all the Vertigo comics, But we weren’t big into DC, we were Marvel fans.”