Marvel’s Wolverine Is Already Teasing a Major Twist That Takes a Page From Marvel’s Spider-Man

Marvel’s Wolverine is poised to be a big hit later this year, building on the success of Marvel’s Spider-Man and expanding Insomniac’s version of the Marvel Universe. Confirmed to be set in the same universe as the Spider-Man games, Marvel’s Wolverine is a drastic reimagining of the X-Men corner of the universe, taking place in a timeline where the team hasn’t yet formed but mutants are already being hunted by threats like Bolivar Trask, the Reavers, and the Sentinels.

This leaves Wolverine and his allies like Jean Grey to take up the fight and protect the innocent mutants caught in their crosshairs. The new story trailer for the game teases a lot of that tone, while also introducing supporting characters and dangerous antagonists for the mission. One mysterious character was also confirmed during Comic-Con that typically has a much more villainous history in the comics than a heroic one, setting up the game’s incarnation of the character to be similar to a reimagined threat from the Spider-Man games.

Marvel’s Wolverine Is Setting Up Essex As Logan’s Mentor

As reported on by Polygon, the Marvel’s Wolverine panel at San Diego Comic-Con, fans got a better idea of the make-up of Team X. The group has been reinvented from the original comics, now serving almost as a precursor to the X-Men by defending mutants from external threats. The trailer even features Logan speaking to someone off-screen who is implied to be the founder of the team and a personal mentor to Wolverine. Fans would likely expect this to be Charles Xavier, but the panel revealed it’s actually someone known as Essex, who also featured in a prequel comic that was given away at the convention. That name is a big deal for X-Men fans, who can now assume that the leader of Team X is Essex — which seems like a set-up for Nathaniel Essex, aka Mister Sinister.

Referenced for a few issues before making his formal debut in The Uncanny X-Men #221 (by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri), Mister Sinister is a brilliant and maniacal geneticist who often works from the background in his mission to create a perfect life-form (that will be an extension of himself). Sinister holds a prominent role in the original comics as well as in other adaptations like X-Men: The Animated Series and X-Men ’97. He’s also appeared in some video games like X-Men Legends, but the confirmation that he’s important in Marvel’s Wolverine could be setting up his biggest game role to date. The tease that he’s the founder of Team X puts a more foreboding touch on the team, especially because Mystique and Sabretooth are also part of the squad — and in the comics have worked as part of Sinister’s much more dangerous team, the Marauders. For fans of the original stories, this reveal is teasing a unique dynamic for Wolverine and Essex that feels like it will inevitably take a grim turn — giving it a thematic connection to Insomniac’s other Marvel game.

Wolverine Is Repeating Spider-Man’s Doc Ock Reinvention

Similar to how Marvel’s Wolverine seems to be rewriting Logan’s dynamic with Essex, Marvel’s Spider-Man had a lot of fun recasting Otto Octavius as Peter Parker’s mentor. While this relationship had been played with elsewhere, Marvel’s Spider-Man made it a key part of the narrative and one of Spider-Man’s most important relationships. Otto started as a nice man with good intentions, but his own internal hang-ups over his illness and the fury stewing within him eventually prompted him to lash out at the people who had “wronged” him, eventually including Spider-Man. It made his transformation into Doctor Octopus all the more tragic and gave the hero (and the players) more complex feelings while facing off with him in the climax of the game.

Marvel’s Wolverine seems to be taking a page from the same playbook, setting it up so that Logan and the audience will come to see Essex as a good man and leader of mutants — only to pull the rug out from underneath them and reveal Essex’s true motivations. Mister Sinister’s age and experience experimenting on mutants might also directly tie him to Logan’s backstory, making Team X an extension of this universe’s Weapon X. There’s also the potential that it could lay the groundwork for Apocalypse, given Mister Sinister’s connections to a villain who could easily be the lead of any prospective follow-up game that formally introduces the X-Men.

It’s an interesting idea, especially given Essex’s history in the source material and the way this could be setting up Logan and Jean’s mission to find and protect mutants to have a much darker ulterior motive they don’t know about. It could also allow Wolverine to confront the same kind of big emotional betrayal that gave the final stretch of Marvel’s Spider-Man so much power. It gives Logan a real connection that can be undone for maximum dramatic effect, all while keeping fans on their toes by remixing some of the key dynamics of the franchise for the new medium.