15 Strangest Movie Casting Rumours That Thankfully Never Happened

3. Bob Hoskins As Wolverine

Way before Hugh Jackman landed the role that would define his career in 2000's X-Men, a big screen adaptation of the popular comic was little more than a pipe dream for fans. Had an X-Men movie seen the light of day a decade or two before it actually did, though, we might have seen a very different Wolverine. The Aussie actor Jackman has come to embody the cinematic version of Wolverine, but wipe his image from your brain if you can. Now picture another Wolverine: short, stocky, and English. If you're picturing Bob Hoskins with adamantium claws then you're on the same bizarre wavelength as X-Men scribe Chris Claremont. Comic book writer Claremont's first choice as the X-Men's most popular member had a very different look to the man who now inhabits the role: Hoskins, most famous for starring in Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and (infamously) Super Mario Bros. Claremont's reasoning for the odd choice was that Hoskins could have pulled off an angry, more animalistic version of the character. In the end Claremont's vision - with Katherine Bigelow directing and Angela Bassett as Storm - never came to pass, and I think we can all agree that's for the best. Hoskins already ruined a childhood hero of ours in Mario, if he had portrayed a short, pot-bellied Wolverine he could have buried the X-Men as a franchise before it had even really started.