THE WOLVERINE Is A Sequel Not A Prequel To The X-MEN Trilogy

One the major problems with the X-Men trilogy prequel X-Men: Origins – Wolverine, was that with its lead character getting amnesia at the end in order to line-up with where his character needed to be for the main movies, it was hard to care about what Logan, aka the Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), went through in the prequel. For the next solo cinematic outing of the character, director James Mangold decided to change where in the character’s timeline the story takes place.

As he told Empire Magazine –

Where this film sits in the universe of the films is after them all. Jean Grey is gone, most of the X-Men are disbanded or gone, so there’s a tremendous sense of isolation for him… That’s something that for me was very important, that I land in a very specific place in his timeline. I wanted to be able to tell the story without the burden of handing it off to a film that already exists and having to conform to it. The ideas of immortality reign very heavily in this story and the burden of immortality weighs heavily on Logan. For me that’s such an interesting part of Logan’s character that is nearly impossible to explore if you have a kind of league or team movie.

Well, that is certainly good news for anyone who would be distracted by Logan looking older in this film then he would a few years later chronologically in the X-Men trilogy. He has a healing factor, but it isn’t something that de-ages him.

And it is interesting that Mangold mentions Jean Grey, as just earlier this week we heard a rumor that actress Famke Janssen, who played the character in the trilogy , had flown to the film’s set in Australia to film a cameo. If true, she could be appearing in either a flashback or dream sequence.

Now I know that some will point to the X-Men: Origins post-credits screen showing Logan in Japan as proof that the film should be taking place after Origins and before the main trilogy. To that I can only suggest that in that scene we never were given anything that tied the scene to a psecific time, so it could have been happening at any point. Or, if you don’t like that rational, it is possible that Logan made more than one trip to Japan.

The Wolverine stars Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Hiroyuki Sanada, Hal Yamanouchi, Tao Okamoto, Rila Fukushima and Brian Tee and opens in theaters on Juky 26, 2013.

Via Coming Soon.