THE
WOLVERINE.

A SEQUEL FOX NEEDED, LEFT WITHOUT A DIRECTOR BEFORE IT STARTED

WHY DARREN ARONOFSKY LEFT, AND HOW JAMES MANGOLD REPLACED HIM

Fox began developing a second Wolverine solo film not long after 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine closed out to some of the franchise’s worst reviews. Darren Aronofsky, who had no connection to that earlier film, signed on to direct this one in October 2010, drawn to a version of the character built around his mortality rather than another origin story.

“As I talked more about the film with my collaborators at Fox, it became clear that the production of ‘The Wolverine’ would keep me out of the country for almost a year. I was not comfortable being away from my family for that length of time.”

Darren Aronofsky, announcing his departure from the film in March 2011

Aronofsky had separated from longtime partner Rachel Weisz several months earlier, with the two sharing a young son, Henry Chance, and pursuing joint custody; he called the script “terrific” and said he was sad not to see the project through alongside “my friend, Hugh Jackman.” Fox weighed other directors before settling on James Mangold that June. Mangold has said he nearly turned the job down on reflex: “It was, oh, who wants to do that, and follow that, and I could hear all of the media swirl about it.” What changed his mind, he said, was the material itself and the chance to work with “a great friend of mine who’s a terrific actor, Hugh Jackman.”

“What I wrote on the back of the script when I first read it was ‘Everyone I love will die.’”

James Mangold, on the theme he pitched Fox when he took over directing

That pitch doubled as a promise to lean on the same comic Fox had wanted on screen for years: Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s 1982 Wolverine.

A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD MINISERIES, MERGED WITH A LATER STORYLINE

HOW CLOSELY THIS FOLLOWS CLAREMONT AND MILLER’S WOLVERINE

Claremont and Miller’s four-issue Wolverine limited series ran from September to December 1982, built around Claremont’s idea of Logan as a failed samurai, a man whose primal instincts keep undercutting the discipline he’s trying to live by. In it, Logan returns to Japan for Mariko Yashida, discovers she has been forced into an abusive marriage arranged by her crime-lord father Shingen, and fights through the ninja organization the Hand to free her, with the assassin Yukio as his closest ally on the ground.

The film keeps that shape: Mariko, Shingen, Yukio and the Hand all appear, and Logan again arrives in Japan for a woman rather than a mission. Two of its other major elements come from elsewhere in the character’s history rather than the 1982 series itself. The Silver Samurai and the assassin Viper, both antagonists in the film, first appeared together the following year, in 1983’s Uncanny X-Men #172 to #173, the storyline covering Logan and Mariko’s aborted wedding: the original limited series doesn’t feature either character.

The film’s other major invention has no comic equivalent at all: a device implanted in Logan’s chest that suppresses his healing factor for most of the story. That sits awkwardly next to Marvel’s own established rule that the healing factor comes from Logan’s mutant biology rather than anything a parasite can switch off, a point critics have flagged since release, but the choice was a deliberate one on Mangold’s part. A Wolverine who can’t be hurt, he has argued, robs a story of genuine stakes.

A YEAR-LONG JAPAN SHOOT, UPENDED BEFORE IT BEGAN

HOW THE 2011 TŌHOKU EARTHQUAKE MOVED THIS PRODUCTION TO AUSTRALIA

The production was still without a director, days after Aronofsky’s exit, when the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake and the tsunami it triggered struck Japan on 11 March 2011. Fox had built the film’s original schedule around extensive Japanese location shooting, and with the country then absorbing the disaster’s human and physical toll, the studio was in no rush to restart its search for a replacement director.

Once Mangold signed on, Fox based principal photography in New South Wales, Australia, rather than Japan, returning to the same state that had hosted 2008’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Sydney Olympic Park stood in for Tokyo street scenes, Surry Hills’ Hopetoun Hotel became a Yukon bar, and a wartime prisoner-of-war camp was built at Kurnell, south of the city. Principal photography ran from 30 July to 21 November 2012, with a dedicated stretch in Japan that August for location and exterior work the Australian sets couldn’t substitute, including a second unit shooting bullet-train and freeway plates around Tokyo and location filming in Hiroshima Prefecture’s Tomonoura and Ehime Prefecture’s Omishima Island, before the crew returned to New South Wales to finish the shoot.

A TEASE MANGOLD DIRECTED HIMSELF, NOT AS A JOKE

THE AIRPORT SCENE THAT HANDED THE FRANCHISE TO DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

The film’s mid-credits scene finds Logan at an airport some time after the main story, asking for a pat-down at security because his adamantium skeleton sets off the metal detector. Metal objects begin to tremble around him, and he turns to find Magneto (Ian McKellen) holding him in place, warning him that humans are building a weapon that could end mutantkind. Professor X (Patrick Stewart), alive and walking despite dying in X-Men: The Last Stand, then appears at Magneto’s side, asking for Logan’s help, while a nearby television advertises Trask Industries, the company behind the Sentinel robots at the center of the next year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Mangold directed the scene himself, built around the shot of Xavier’s wheelchair weaving through a crowd of frozen airport extras, a sequence he has compared to watching Patrick Stewart run an Olympic slalom on an electric wheelchair. He traveled to the Days of Future Past set in Montreal to shoot it with that film’s cast, roughly two and a half months before The Wolverine’s release.

“I don’t like a button that is kind of at the expense… If I just put a lot of effort into making a dramatic story, I don’t want to kind of undercut it at the end with something silly.”

James Mangold, on why he avoided a “tongue-in-cheek” tone for the scene

It worked: the scene became one of the better-received stingers the X-Men franchise had produced to that point, functioning as a genuine bridge rather than a cameo, setting up Days of Future Past’s plot directly the following summer in a way Fox’s X-Men films rarely connected to one another.

THE REWATCH

SIX MONTHS OF JACKMAN’S TRAINING, AND A FAR BETTER REVIEW THAN WOLVERINE’S LAST SOLO FILM

Hugh Jackman, then in his mid-forties, rebuilt his physique for the role with a routine he has since summarized bluntly: “The first thing you need is six months. You need six months to do it,” he said. “And then you’ve gotta eat 6,000 calories a day and you’ve gotta train like a madman.”

The film opened to $53.1 million domestically, the softest opening of any X-Men-branded film to that point, but performed far better overseas, finishing with $132.6 million in the US and $414.8 million worldwide. Reviews improved sharply on Origins: Rotten Tomatoes lists a 70% critics’ score against that film’s 37%, with an official consensus calling it “one superhero movie that manages to stay true to the comics while keeping casual viewers entertained,” albeit one whose “final act succumbs to the usual cartoonish antics.” Metacritic’s 61 topped Origins’ 40 as well.

For a first watch, The Wolverine sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after Iron Man 3, and continues the X-Men movies in order guide directly after X-Men: First Class, leading into X-Men: Days of Future Past.