See Logan Director James Mangold's Reaction to Hugh Jackman's Wolverine Return in Deadpool 3

At the end of director James Mangold's Logan, even a mutant healing factor can't save Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) from death. After surviving being shot, stabbed, drowned, mauled, and maimed across nine X-Men movies between 2000 and 2017, a worn-out and weary Wolverine succumbs to his injuries in battle with his clone — X-24, the ultimate weapon — and dies protecting daughter X-23/Laura (Dafne Keene). As the last-surviving X-Man, Logan was Jackman's sendoff to the X-Verse, with the Australian actor saying of his swansong in 2017: "At some point, you've got to leave the party. It's time to go home."

Now it's time to come home. Jackman will play Wolverine "one more time" opposite Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 3, set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and produced by Kevin Feige's Marvel Studios. (Feige served as an associate producer on 2000's X-Men and a co-producer on 2003's X2.) 

Reacting to news of Jackman's X-Men return on Twitter, Mangold tweeted a GIF from the character's brutal death scene in Logan. See the tweet below.

In a subsequent tweet, Mangold clarified: "Oh my gosh! Everybody chill. Just kidding! I'm all good! LOGAN will always be there. Multiverse or prequel, time warp or worm hole, canon or non-canon or even without a rationale, I cannot wait to see what madness my dear friends @VancityReynolds and @RealHughJackman cook up!"

While promoting Logan in 2017, Mangold told ComicBook he'd be "startled that Hugh was strapping it on again" if the longtime X-Men star ever returned to the role after (literally) burying the character.

"What I'd be curious about if any one of these things happened would be, what are they doing with it? Meaning, I would have no qualms about it if someone had a good idea. If it's basically, 'I ran out of money and I needed a big paycheck, and I'm doing an empty film that cheapens the quality of the previous,' well, that would be its own sadness."

Mangold continued: "But the reality is that, if you have a good idea for a character, then there's nothing wrong with doing anything. I don't make these rules. For me, I'm always just asking that someone do something imaginative that doesn't just seem like you're taking all these assets and throwing them on a screen again, just to make dough. That seems to me to be, or to satiate a kind of hunger people have to see more, when the hunger they have to see more is what a movie supposed to leave you with. Meaning that you're supposed to love the characters and that just like a good meal, there is such a thing as too much. Just because it tastes good, if I keep filling your plate, at some point you're going to be like that guy in the restaurant in the Monty Python movie. There's just a limit."

It was Mangold and Jackman who decided Wolverine should die to end Logan, which was intended to be Jackman's goodbye to the Marvel Comics character he'd played since 2000. 

"It seemed logical, that if it were going to be his last film, that he's either going to ride off onto the horizon or die," Mangold told ComicBook at the time. "That you need to have some kind of curtain on his story, that's a logical assumption, right? So you either have the Shane ending where he rides off on the mountain to parts unknown, which had largely been the way his character was resolved in every proceeding movie. Or you'd kill him. But the reason the choice was at our feet was because you needed the sense of closure. You needed some sense of an ending if you were going to end, if you were dealing with the legacy of Hugh's many performances and many films, and trying to set this part in some definitive way." 

It's unclear how Jackman's Wolverine will return in Deadpool 3. His longtime X-Men and Logan co-star Patrick Stewart, who played Professor Charles Xavier, recently returned as a multiversal variant in Marvel Studios' Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Marvel Studios' Deadpool 3, starring Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, opens in theaters September 6th, 2024.

0comments