10 Radical Ideas To Reboot Wolverine On Film
He's the best there is at what he does. But enough about Hugh Jackman, RIP.
It’s now six months since the premiere of Logan, the last appearance of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Set a dozen years in the future, and six years after the happy ending at the tail end of Days Of Future Past, this effectively represented the bleak, and-then-they-all-burst-into-flames coda to the X-Men franchise.
Or did it? Since Fox have committed to making X-Men movies into the foreseeable future, and since X-Men continuity even before Logan’s release resembled nothing so much as a tangled bag of hair, we can be forgiven for being sceptical.
This isn’t the end of the X-Men… and, Jackman’s retirement from the franchise notwithstanding, this clearly isn’t the end of Wolverine.
The question then becomes: how exactly are Fox going to bring the character back? Answering that would require one to be both a X-Movie expert and a thirty-year devotee of the comic books they’re loosely adapted from. Well, you're in luck.
Here they are, then: ten increasingly outlandish ideas to bring the Wolverine character back to the big screen again. Oh, and here be spoilers for those of you who’ve not yet seen the films in question.
10. Not Everything With An X On It Has To Be Complicated
Let’s get this one out of the way. The easiest way to bring Wolverine back is to recast him. No weird and wonderful sci-fi explanation as to why he looks different, no convoluted storyline to resurrect him after his sticky end in Logan. Just make a movie set before 2029, and hire someone new to play him.
Diehard Jackholes (that’s what Hugh Jackman fanatics call themselves, right?) will no doubt be up in arms over it, insisting that no one else can possibly play a five-foot-three Canadian but a six-foot-two Australian veteran of musical theatre. However, let’s not forget that, eighteen years ago, it was the same subset of nerd society who said the exact opposite.
Hugh Jackman is a wonderful actor who has been instrumental in making Wolverine a household name. Sean Connery did the same thing for James Bond back in the early sixties, as did Michael Keaton for Batman in the early nineties. All three men had to move on at some point, and so should everyone else.
Of course, the real problem is that choosing the wrong person can set you back years and millions of dollars and leave you back where you started. You can ask George Lazenby and Val Kilmer about that, if you like.