10 Radical Ideas To Reboot Wolverine On Film

It took comics legend Grant Morrison to elevate the convoluted Weapon X concept beyond ‘hinky chop shop for Canadian black ops’. He retconned the ‘X’ as the Roman numeral for ‘ten’, and Weapon X as an offshoot of the Weapon Plus project, which began life as an attempt to recreate Project: Rebirth, the experimental procedure that created Captain America.

Obviously a Fox-produced X-Men movie can’t namecheck Steve Rogers - but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something similar with the movie-based Weapon X project. However, Weapon Plus has the advantage of being a far more imaginative extension of the Wolverine mythos than the more pedestrian Weapon X.

The cheerfully amoral master thief Fantomex, aka Weapon XIII, is a sharpshooter possessed of a sentient external nervous system and three brains. Weapon III was Harry Pizer, a grotesque skinless man with the power to extrude his musculature into bizarre shapes. Weapon XII was the Huntsman, a creature with a viral hive mind, literally able to transform people into extensions of itself.

While Weapon X contented itself with playing doctor with feral mutants, Weapon Plus was creating posthuman hybrids of man and Sentinel using nanotechnology and sentient viruses: proof that Wolverine’s replacement doesn’t have to be another snarling, stabby wild thing.