Mark Bomback, who wrote Live Free or Die Hard as well as Len Wiseman’s remake of Total Recall, has been tapped to rewrite Christopher McQuarrie’s script for Fox’s The Wolverine, the sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. 

Variety reports that the Wolverine sequel will find the film’s eponymous hero suffering from amnesia and trying to find answers by examining his past in the Yakuza underworld of Japan.  Except for Hugh Jackman as Wolvie and a “newly expanded” character named “Viper” who is the Caucasian secretary of Japan’s Minister of Justice, the entire cast will be composed of Japanese and Japanese-American actors.

Just a couple of weeks ago Fox was set to begin filming The Wolverine in Canada in November (see “Wolverine Sequel Filming in Canada”), but then the studio apparently decided “for reasons that remain “somewhat murky” to push the start of filming back to the spring of 2012.  With the announcement of the hiring of Bomback it appears that the studio may have felt there were problems with the script that needed to be fixed before embarking on the expensive production.