Watch Wolverine Try to Change His Iconic Hairstyle in a New Fan Film

Filmmaker Mahmut Akay has a new fan film out on YouTube, and it’s a heartfelt and funny look at Wolverine. Titled Close Shave, the short is a character-driven “dark comedy set in a barber shop and depicts Wolverine in a new way while touching on identity and prejudice,” according to Akay. In the film, which is ten minutes long, Wolverine visits a barber shop to start fresh in human society with a new trim, but finds himself in trouble when his mutant identity is exposed. Fans in the comments are, as so often happens when a fan film is more than a cheap copy of a story from the comics, surprised by how effective it is.

The film is, unsurprisingly given the subject matter, pretty blood-spattered. But that doesn’t mean it sinks into the dour perspective so many Wolverine stories do.

You can check it out below.

The film has the feel of some of those clever, subversive fan films that have longevity, whether it’s The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special or Adi Shankar’s influential The Punisher fan film, Dirty Laundry. The aesthetic, though, is pretty in line with the rest of Akay’s shorts, which you can check out at his official website.

Cameron Jack, Michael Chase, Tom Cray, Jack Forsyth-Noble, Jacob Meadows, Neizan F. Birchwood, and Julia Sawalha star in the film, which was directed by Akay.

This is far from the first time we’ve seen Wolverine in live action, of course; he debuted in 2000’s X-Men and was played by Hugh Jackman. That version of Wolverine appeared in a number of films, wrapping up with 2017’s Logan, in which he finally died and passed on the role of badass, clawed X-person to his surrogate daughter.

Of course, in the time since then, fans have wanted to know when we will see Logan head back to the screen. The Marvel Cinematic Universe will obviously get Wolverine and the X-Men at some point or another, but nobody knows when that will be, what context it will have, or who might play the characters. There are always a number of fancasts, fantasies, and rumors out there, but for the moment, this movie is the closest thing we’re getting to a (tongue-in-cheek) follow-up to Logan.

Truth be told, we could do a lot worse.

What do you think of Close Shave? Who would you like to see play Logan when he finally comes to the MCU? Sound off below.