11 Most Intense Performances In Comic Book Movies

2. Hugh Jackman - Wolverine (Logan)

logan x-men
20th Century Fox

Few would have expected Hugh Jackman to own Wolverine quite the way he has these last two decades, but with nine appearances as the character under his belt, there wasn't a dry eye in the theatre when he chose to depart in last year's Logan.

Logan was a role Jackman took to almost immediately, and without him, it's fair to say that the character would lack the iconic status he currently enjoys. There are a bunch of factors for that, with X-Men releasing at a time when the comic book movie genre was first emerging as a force at the box office, but Jackman's performance is a key one.

He just plain got the character, and took things to a whole other level in last year's Logan, where he portrayed the former X-Man in his lonely, final years. James Mangold's film made for a storytelling masterclass as a result, and with Jackman bowing out of the character in the film's closing moments, having experienced a whole lot on the way, no one could possibly say he did so poorly.

The film's beautifully haunting, and while Jackman had always managed to embody the character convincingly, this was a performance unequaled by his comic book contemporaries.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.