Wolverine 3: James Mangold Says X-23 Forces Logan To Deal With Parenthood

Logan is a piece of the X-Men movie universe but it stands completely on its own. That was made possible because director James Mangold selected a distant enough future where the events of recent films such as X-Men: Days of Future Past can have much of an effect on Logan.

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“It’s year 2029 when the movie takes place,” Logan director James Mangold told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview.

Mangold went on to explain his reasoning in more detail — specifically citing the post-credits scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past as the basis for his decision.

“There’s an epilogue scene in Days of Future Past which is 2024, or 2023, something like that,” Mangold said. “I just wanted to get far enough past. My goal was real simple: it was to pick a time where I had enough elbow room that I was clear of existing entanglements. Part of the way I think this films stop being fresh (these films being franchise comic book movies) is when you find yourself making essentially a television series with $200 million episodes where you’re literally just picking up where the last one left off and you’re making a mini-series. Then, it’s impossible to do something fresh, meaning essentially you’re just a director on the 14th episode of a television show picking up where the last one left off and people are going to be really startled by any discontinuity or changes.”

This time around, Mangold hopes Logan will be self-contained and tell an entire story in its run time. It will explore uncharted emotional territories of the X-Men universe by pairing Logan with the little X-23 for a relationship which looks a lot like a father-daughter duo.

“That wasn’t the goal here,” Mangold said. “The goal here was to somehow make a film that’s different: to be a filmmaker myself and go, ‘How would I bring myself to this? What would I do if I was starting from scratch? What would I explore? What have I seen not explored?’ Not only in the X-Men universe but in comic book movies in general.”

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Logan hits theaters March 3, 2017.

When you look at Wolverine’s on-screen resume, it’s pretty impressive. The X-Men character has saved the world on a number of times, put down his love as she almost roasted everyone around her, stopped a giant metal samurai, survived the bombing of Japan in World War II, and stopped Magneto at least three times.

One issue he has never had to tackle is being a parent.

While there’s no confirmation of X-23 being Logan‘s daughter just yet, teases in the trailers and first 40 minutes of footage put on display by 20th Century Fox suggest as much. Laura Kinney is a mutant with very similar features to Logan’s — so much that Professor X tells him “she’s a lot like you” in a tone which makes its translation sound like “she’s your daughter.”

In any case, Logan will develop a fatherly relationship with X-23 in the upcoming film, whether he likes it or not. ComicBook.com caught up with Logan director James Mangold to hear about it.

“The movie is about introducing — always a good movie is about introducing — characters you may know with characters who are fresh and make demands upon them,” Mangold said of X-23. “One of the things we’ve never had to see Logan contend with is the rigors of parenthood.”

“One of the things I’ll tell you you’re face with when you have kids is seeing a mirror reflection of yourself,” Mangold said. “Suddenly, you’re having to discipline and steer and guide a child who is doing behaviors that you yourself have shown them how to do. In this case, Logan being a hot-tempered, foul-mouthed, prone to violence loner, when he meets his own relfection in a child. That’s gonna cause some sparks in a relationship that I think are what happen in the remainder of the movie that you haven’t seen.”

As Mangold said, the character is a reflection of Jackman’s Wolverine. What makes her standout in the film is the awe inspired by watching a young girl be let loose like an animal upon enemies. It’s a sense of originality and disbelief all rolled into impressively shot, choreographed, and directed action sequences. However, it will be the relationship developed between two characters, hardened by the world they’ve been living in, which leaves fans appreciating Jackman’s emotional sendoff from the franchise.

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Logan hits theaters on March 3, 2017.