X-Men: 10 Characters That Must Appear In The New Mutants Movie

If Cypher’s death provides a storytelling dynamic that was instrumental in the New Mutants narrative, then Warlock’s life provides the yang to its yin.

The young scion of an alien race of conquerors, the Technarchy, Warlock was considered a mutant of his kind due to his compassion and lack of desire to vampirically drain the life from all that opposed him.

A technorganic being, Warlock was living machinery, able to change his shape into anything he desired. More importantly for many ongoing plotlines in X-Men continuity, Warlock and his race had the ability to infect non-technorganic life with the Transmode Virus. It’s how they sustained themselves: by transforming living things into technorganic creatures, then draining the life from those creatures, leaving them broken and dead machine-husks.

As an alien on earth learning to be more human, Warlock’s friendship with the New Mutants - and especially Cypher - provides welcome comic relief, as well as plenty of muscle. His complete innocence and delight in being alive is more infectious than the virus he carries, and his membership of the team distinguishes the New Mutants from every other mutant super team of the last thirty years.

It’s a variation of the technorganic virus that Apocalypse uses to augment his own matter-manipulation abilities, so it’s not outside the realms of possibility that in the films’ continuity, Apocalypse could be using a captured Warlock as the source of this experimentation.

With today’s CGI, Warlock is no longer an impossibility to realise on film - all a director has to be careful of is that his personality and peculiar way of speaking doesn’t become self-consciously wacky. We’re looking at Johnny Five from Short Circuit here, not Jar Jar bloody Binks.