Logan: James Mangold Reveals Original Wolverine Test Footage for Film’s Opening Scene

Though Marvel fans know Wolverine as an unstoppable badass (he’s the best he is at what he does after all), Hugh Jackman‘s final film as the character decided to play with those expectations in more ways than one. The opening scene of James Mangold‘s Logan at first shows a defeated and fallible version of the character, handily getting the crap knocked out of him by regular people in defense of his car. A quick turn in anger flips it entirely into the other direction though as Jackman’s character severs arms, cuts throats, and impales heads on his claws sending a clear message: This is not your daddy’s PG-13 Wolverine movie.

While tweeting along with the movie for ComicBook.com’s latest Quarantine Watch Party, Mangold offered a fresh look behind-the-scenes of how this sequence came together. The filmmaker posted a video that he created in collaboration with the film’s Stunt Coordinator and Second Unit Director Garret Warren, showing that even in the pre-production phase of the movie they had a firm handle on how the movie was going to open. You can watch Mangold’s pre-vis version below while the version that appears in the final cut of the movie can be seen above. Frankly there are very few differences!

Ahead of tonight’s big event, Mangold spoke with ComicBook.com about his time working on the film and with the character and if he thinks Hugh Jackman will return to the character with Marvel Studios.

“In many ways it was about the freedom that Wolverine bought me,” Mangold said about choosing to make the film. “The desire for the studio to make another Wolverine movie, Hugh’s own resolve to make a final Wolverine movie, not thinking of, if there was going to be one more it would be his last. And my own feeling that I really didn’t want to do a movie like that again, if I didn’t have a greater sense of freedom to do what felt like I was missing when I saw these films. When I saw what had become its own genre as it were, of superhero or comic book movies, as they’re called. I don’t really think of it as a genre. I think it’s, but to the degree that we’ve had a lot of those movies the last couple decades, I’ve felt like a lot of them are doing the same thing over and over again. And it was not interesting to me to do that.”

As the above sequence shows, Mangold definitely did not do the same thing over again even by X-Men standards. Moments of Berzerker Rage from Jackman’s character were long standout scenes in the entire franchise, but Logan took it to another level by letting the blood flow and by knocking the character down a couple of pegs in the un-killable department.