The MCU Needs To Stay Away From This Wolverine Story

Deadpool & Wolverine‘s massive success has meant that it’s only a matter of time before Wolverine shows up again in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There have been rumors that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is going to show up elsewhere in the MCU, with many assuming that he’ll make appearances in the upcoming Avengers films. Wolverine is one of Marvel’s most popular characters, right up there with Spider-Man, so it’s only a matter of time before Wolverine returns for his own story in the MCU and not just hangingout with Deadpool.

As Marvel Studios uses comic stories as starting points for their adaptations and Wolverine has a lot of amazing stories to choose from, there is a wealth of comic content we could see brought to life. However, there’s one Wolverine story that Marvel Studios should never touch – Old Man Logan. This classic story is a fan favorite – and was teased in Deadpool & Wolverine – but it needs to stay in the comics.

Old Man Logan Isn’t the Type of Story Marvel Studios Does Well

Marvel Studios has gone all in with its multiversal storytelling – it’s the entire reason Deadpool & Wolverine worked in the first place. However, looking at their track record with multiverse projects, things aren’t exactly rosy. Loki and the aforementioned Deadpool & Wolverine are beloved and critically acclaimed, but other multiverse-centric Marvel projects – Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and What If…? aren’t. Quantumania‘s failure played a big role in the end of what was once called the Multiverse Saga. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness gets points for director Sam Raimi’s stylish direction, but for basically nothing else. Marvel Studios entirely missed the point of What If…? as a concept with interconnected arcs and repeated characters.

Two out of five isn’t exactly good, and that’s reason enough to not want Marvel Studios to touch Old Man Logan. Old Man Logan is a simple story – it’s basically the movie Unforgiven with superheroes – but what makes it special is the worldbuilding. Mark Millar and Steve McNiven do a brilliant job of using their tale to tell the story of this villain conquered world. Some of the storytelling comes from the dialogue and captions, but some of it is done with the visuals. It’s a visceral story, not as needlessly edgy of many of Millar’s other Marvel work, and has a depth to it that has eluded most of Marvel Studios’ multiverse content – in fact, a depth that’s eluded much of Marvel Studios’ content period.

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Old Man Logan is exactly the kind of story that Marvel Studios would want to adapt, but they aren’t going to do a very good job. Old Man Logan is a dark and complex story, its violence an integral part of its narrative. Injecting it with MCU style storytelling isn’t going to help it, it’s going to weaken it. Marvel has never meant a tense scene it couldn’t ruin with a joke, and Old Man Logan doesn’t need that sort of thing. Seeing the Venom possessed tyrannosaurus or the corpse of a giant Ant-Man on the big screen would be great, but we don’t need to see Captain Carter show up. We don’t need Old Man Logan cracking jokes while cutting up the Hulk Gang.

Old Man Logan is an extremely popular story, but it would be better for Marvel Studios to start with something like Weapon X – the origin of his adamantium skeleton glimpsed in X-Men: Apocalypse – or one of the many great Wolverine/Sabretooth stories instead of a multiverse Wolverine story. Old Man Logan‘s popularity has meant that Logan has returned many times since the story’s end in 2009, but it doesn’t need an adaptation. Not now, and maybe not ever.

Old Man Logan Should Stay Where It Belongs – the Comics

Old Man Logan is a sensational comic. It’s probably Mark Millar’s – the man who wrote Civil War, the inspiration for Captain America: Civil War – best Marvel work. Steve McNiven’s art is breathtaking and is perfect for the story. It’s not the most original story in the history of the comic industry – dystopian futures controlled by villains where beaten down old heroes try to survive are very common – but its so well-crafted. Part of that is the fact that it is a comic. Some comic stories work so well because of the medium of sequential storytelling, the way that words and pictures combine to tell the tale. Old Man Logan is one of those stories.

There’s a reason that Logan didn’t actually adapt Old Man Logan. The story just doesn’t work as well outside of the comic medium. There’s too much of it that depends on being a comic. Marvel Studios does great work at times, but their multiversal stories, more often than not, aren’t their best work. If Marvel Studios needs to do a multiversal Wolverine story, they should look to The Age of Apocalypse Wolverine miniseries (which is also called Weapon X, by the by) or maybe the What If… where Wolverine becomes a vampire lord. Leave Old Man Logan in the comics, where it belongs.