After years of waiting, Disney released the new trailer for The New Mutants today. Based on the first-ever spinoff of the X-Men comics, The New Mutants marries mutants to horror and the film has the villain to match. The film draws inspiration from Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz’s “The Demon Bear Saga,” one of the best-known New Mutants stories. The new trailer offers fans their first look at the cinematic version of the tale’s titular villain. At the end of the trailer, following the title card, Magik drops out of one of her teleportation discs wielding her Soulsword and armor. She faces a monstrous, shadowy beast with glowing red eyes. This is the Demon Bear. Take a look below.
The Demon Bear is connected to Danielle “Mirage” Moonstar. In the comics, the beast claimed to have killed Dani’s parents when she was a child and promised to hunt Dani forever. In “The Demon Bear Saga,” the Demon Bear catches up with Dani at Xavier’s School. Dani faces him and she’s mauled by the Bear. The other New Mutants take Dani to a hospital, but the Demon Bear follows them there. Together, they make a stand against the creature.
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In 2016, The New Mutants director Josh Boone explained that 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.”
What do you think of the movie’s Demon Bear? How do you feel about the new trailer for The New Mutants? Let us know what you think about it in the comments section. The New Mutants opens in theaters on April 3rd.