The X-Men are easily the busiest section of the Marvel Universe. Though there have been several Avengers teams and the FF explore other universes every other week, none of it has anything on the Children of the Atom. New mutants are constantly being created to populate all the teams of heroes, villains, and even non-combatant individuals that remind everyone mutants are the next stage of human evolution. The Fox films know this, and have done a decent job of incorporating dozens of mutants across their ten X-Men related movies. We've gotten the A-Listers like Wolverine and Storm, smaller characters like Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and mid-tier ones like Multiple Man. It all tends to work out because there's always some new story that can be told with characters the audience has never seen before.

But surprisingly, despite this wide variety of Mutants who've made their way to the big screen, there are quite a few that haven't. Some pretty powerful ones too -- former Phoenix holders, Mistresses of Magnetism, and more. But CBR has the scoop on all of those, and we're here to tell you all about 15 of the most powerful mutants that have never made it onto the big screen.

15 CECILIA REYES

Cecilia Reyes

Created by Scott Lobdell and Carlos Pacheco, Cecilia Reyes was one of a trio of new X-Men introduced in the mid to late 90's, and she's easily the most interesting...though when your competition is Marrow and Maggott, that's admittedly not too hard. Cecilia possesses the ability to project bio force fields that can resist both energy and physical attacks, and can protect others with them or even use them as a weapon.

A genius scientist who's often helped the X-Men at several points with her abilities as a surgeon more than with her actual abilities, for Cecilia it isn’t always about her mutant powers. This is technically cheating since the character will be included in New Mutants. But since New Mutants is now well over a year off, it still counts.

14 ARMOR

Armor resized - Wolverine and The X-Men Alpha Omega 3 Resized copy

Hisako Ichiki is one of the younger mutants in the X-Men. Introduced in Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s now legendary Astonishing X-Men run from the mid '00s, she’s probably one of the few mutants who decided she wanted to be an X-Man instead of just falling into the position after one too many attempts on her life by mutants while she was just learning to use her powers. Initially a part of Kitty Pryde’s Paladins group, Hisako is one of the very few younger mutants to retain her abilities.

With the apt code name of “Armor”, Hisako is capable of creating a large exoskeleton around her body that’s entirely psionic in nature. Incredibly durable, Hisako’s armor has allowed her to survive any number of falls or even atmospheric re-entry. She can also make the body armor grow weapons, emulating Wolverine’s claws, or make the armor grow much larger.

13 FANTOMEX

Inspired by a variety of international comics, Fantomex is direct from the twisted genius mind of Grant Morrison, who wrote the X-Men from 2001-2004. Fantomex is loosely connected to Wolverine, as during his run Morrison revealed that it wasn’t “Weapon X”, but rather Weapon Ten. Fantomex is the next step of that in the Weapon Plus program, as Weapon XIII.

Raised inside something called “the World”, an area designed to generate and raise super-sentinels for a war between humanity and mutants, Fantomex eventually joins the X-Men after they help liberate him and stop the Weapon Plus program. As a product of super-science, Fantomex possesses three different brains and an external nervous system that looks like a flying saucer, in addition to the mutant ability to cause people to see illusions.

12 DAZZLER

Dazzler was originally a cross-media project, where the character was invented as a collaboration between Marvel Comics and music company Casablanca Records, where Marvel agreed to create a singing superhero while Casablanca would introduce a new singer. Though that didn’t work out, Dazzler has remained a fan favorite for years.

Initially a fan of disco, a combination of the sliding timescale and the fact that the dominant musical genre is constantly changing has lead to Dazzler being everything from a rock to a pop artist. But while Alison Blaire started out as a musician, as she got connected to the X-Men she’s done everything from be a superhero to become a bonafide secret agent with S.H.I.E.L.D. Musically inclined, Dazzler is capable of transforming sonic vibrations into light of various levels, capable of either blinding you or hitting you with a laser. Groovy.

11 POLARIS

Polaris All-New X-Factor

Polaris is another of those characters you’d think would have made her way into the films by now, but not so much. One of Magneto’s children, Lorna Dane is gifted with the ability to control magnetism just like her dad, even using it to help her fly. But unlike her father, she’s also known for struggling with mental issues which can often make it hard for her to do work as a card carrying superhero.

This one’s a bit cheap because thanks to the Fox TV show Gifted, Polaris gets to make weekly appearances during the fall, brought to life wonderfully by actress Emma Dumont. There she leads a small resistance force in the absence of the X-Men, which is actually ironic considering in the comics she was one of the earliest members of the team, predating even fan favorites like Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and more.

10 DUST

Dust of the X-Men

Another X-Men introduced during Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men, Sooraya Qadir first appeared in New X-Men vol. 2 #133 in December 2002. From Afghanistan, Sooraya’s powers activated when someone tried to remove her niqab, with part of her body transforming into sand and flaying the person alive. Not long afterwards, the X-Corporation brought her out of Afghanistan and recruited her into Xavier’s, where she became a member of Emma Frost’s Hellions squad to learn how to use her powers properly.

Dust was unique enough as a character between her background, personality, and powerset to be one of the 198 remaining mutants that kept their powers after Scarlet Witch altered reality to get rid of the mutant race. A member of the Young X-Men, she’s one of the few members of the new generation of mutants that’s still alive and hasn’t quit the team.

9 SAURON

marvel-sauron

No, Tolkien’s Dark Lord isn’t actually a mutant, even if that would be pretty cool. This Sauron is a man named Karl Lykos, a man that was originally the son of an explorer that got bitten on a trip with his father and gained the ability to drain people’s life force energy.

Eventually becoming dependent on this energy, what Karl would learn is that absorbing the energy of superhuman beings would create a completely different transformation within him. He’d taken on the appearance of a more bestial creature that he would name Sauron (Latin for lizard) due to his resemblance to the ancient Pterodactyl. As Sauron, Karl can fly, has super strength, fire breath, and the ability to hypnotize people with just a glance from his eyes.

8 NORTHSTAR

X-Men - Northstar, Gambit, and Wolverine

As the first openly gay character made by Marvel Comics, Northstar deserves a higher profile than what he’s normally resigned to. Initially a part of the Canadian super-team Alpha Flight, Jean-Paul Beaubier is a mutant with the ability to fly and run at close to the speed of light, as well as fire off powerful light energy bursts when in contact with his twin sister, Aurora.

Though he started out as a member of Alpha Flight when he was introduced in Uncanny X-Men #120 by the creative team of Chris Claremont and John Byrne, he would eventually join the X-Men themselves a few decades later. Makes sense, Alpha Flight is kind of the training ground for heroes before they go on to join the big leagues anyway.

7 HUSK

Husk From X-Men

The Guthrie family is nearly as gifted as the Summers when it comes to handing out mutant powers. They don’t wind up as overpowered, but when a family has ten children and half of them wind up with mutant powers, something’s up. One of Sam Guthrie’s nine siblings, Paige Guthrie wouldn’t develop powers and be revealed as a mutant until Fabian Nicieza and Tony Daniel’s X-Force #24 in 1994. She would eventually become a fixture in the Emma Frost and Banshee-led Generation X team, until finally joining the X-Men.

She even became a teacher at Wolverine’s Jean Grey School in Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men. Paige easily has one of the most unique powers amongst her fellow mutants, capable of shedding her skin and becoming a completely different elemental composition with her “new” skin. She’s turned into everything from glass or wood all the way to adamantium!

6 DANGER

Danger’s kind of stretching the definition of a “mutant”, but her existence is a mutant impossibility so it still kinda counts. During the Joss Whedon/John Cassaday Astonishing X-Men run, it’s revealed that the X-Men’s Danger Room AI has achieved complete sentience. For an entire arc, she terrorizes the mutant heroes that have spent years honing their skills thanks to her, before finally attempting to kill Professor X for knowing about her sentience and ignoring her due to not knowing exactly how to help free her without damaging her code.

After Xavier eventually helps to repair her once she gets damaged going up against a Shi’ar salvage crew, Danger joined the X-Men and has been a member now for over a decade. As a robot, Danger has superhuman strength, flight, the ability to fire energy, and knows how to exert control over other machines.

5 LONGSHOT

Longshot From X-Men

It’s better to be lucky than good. But it’s even better when you can be both. That’s how Longshot works at least. From the twisted Mojoverse dimension, Longshot was an artificially created human who started out with the natural born ability to defy probability. After serving as one of Mojo’s slaves, Longshot eventually teamed up with other slaves and started an uprising.

Despite this, his luck powers have a limit, and his uprising was eventually quelled and his memory wiped before he made his way to Earth. Periodically he goes back to the Mojoverse to fight, always seeking to bring justice to his people, and his story is one of the few on this list that honestly deserves to be a film all by itself.

4 FIRESTAR

firestar-hottest

It’s weird that one of the most popular mutants of the eighties has never been in one of the X-Films, but here we are. If you’re thinking this character looks familiar, then you’ve probably enjoyed quite a bit of Saturday Morning Cartoons. Angelica Jones made her first appearance on NBC’s Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends cartoon series.

Her spot was originally meant for the Human Torch, but when NBC couldn’t make that happen, they decided to shake things up and add a little female energy to the show with Firestar. With the ability to store electromagnetic energy, Angelica can transform that power into microwave radiation, granting her everything from flight to microwave energy blasts that can fry anything in her path. Being a walking nuclear reactor, guess it’s a good thing she isn’t as big a fan of pranks as Johnny Storm is.

3 HOPE SUMMERS

Hope Summers

Somehow if you’ve got the last name “Summers”, you invariably wind up with some of the most busted powers in the mutant race. The first new mutant to appear after Scarlet Witch’s “No More Mutants” decree, Hope’s activation occurred as a baby, and the moment she’s born she causes a ripple in the world. The battle to control Hope gets so heated she’s eventually grasped by Cable and taken into the future, where she spends several years training with him until she becomes a teenager and returns to the past.

Once in the past, we learned she possessed the power of being able to awaken new mutants’ powers. But more than that, she has the mutant ability of mimicking other mutants powers…and amplifying them, making her easily one of the most dangerous mutants ever born.

2 MONET

Monet St Croix

Monet Yvette Clarisse Maria Therese St. Croix (also known simply as “M”) is basically mutant Superman. She first joined a super group as a member of Generation X before going on to join up with the X-Factor Investigations detective agency, then eventually the X-Men proper.

There’s a complex background to her character thanks to her siblings: her brother’s a weird psychic mutant vampire known as Emplate, while her sisters Nicole and Claudette once merged and pretended to be her for years while she was trapped in the body of an emotionless doll called Penance. Comics can get pretty weird, so don’t get too caught up in that. The point is, Monet is a rich aristocrat who can fly, is partially invulnerable, has super-speed and strength, a genius level intellect, and is both a telepath and a telekinetic. If there’s a superpower lottery, she won it. Twice.

1 QUENTIN QUIRE

Quentin Quire

The Most Annoying Mutant You’ve Never Heard Of. Quentin Quire is another mutant from the mind of Grant Morrison. Initially virulently anti-human, our introduction to Quire is as a character who incites the mutant teenagers at Xavier's school to riot.

The character flirts back and forth between being a villain and being a hero, though most recently he's been on the side of the angels. Quentin boasts incredible omega level psychic abilities, allowing him to think faster than others, and convince people to think the way he wants them to. He even experienced the Phoenix Force for a time, and kept that inside him until he decided to use those powers to restore Jubilee's mutant powers, lost since the Scarlet Witch took them from her.