Strong Hints at an 'Old Man Logan' Type Narrative in R-Rated Finale
Posted by ICv2 on October 5, 2016 @ 3:11 pm CT
Hugh Jackman announced on Twitter that the title of his third and final Wolverine movie will be Logan, a definite hint that Mark Millar’s 2008 Old Man Logan storyline, which focuses on an aging, somewhat diminished Wolverine, might be providing the source material for Jackman’s last go-round as the admantium-enhanced superhero. Of course the poster image that Jackman released on Twitter showed Wolvie with claws extended holding the hand of a child, which suggests something akin to a Lone Wolf & Cub story, but it is pretty clear that film will present the Canadian superhero at the end of his tether.
After Jackman tweeted his image showing a film poster on the side of a building, the director of Logan, James Mangold tweeted a clean version of the poster (see above) as well as the second page of the script for the movie. A close look at the screenplay page’s second paragraph yields some interesting information about the film’s eponymous hero, who, as is the case in Millar’s Old Man Logan saga, is well past his prime. The description reads: “Logan is older now and it’s clear his abilities aren’t what they once were. He’s fading on the inside, and his diminished healing factory keeps him in a constant state of chronic pain—hence booze as a painkiller.” Did Fox shorten the title, because young viewers might be turned off by a movie entitled Old Man Logan? It won’t be long before the full nature of the film’s narrative is revealed as Jackman’s swansong as Wolvie is due in theaters on March 3, 2017.
One thing that is already pretty clear is that the final Jackman Wolverine film will be the first in the series to carry an “R” rating, now that Deadpool has made the world safe for R-rated superhero films (see “Here Comes the Parade of R-rated Superhero Movies”). The screenplay is quite matter-of-fact in announcing that in the violent world it is portraying there will be no unbelievable miraculous escapes, noting that in the film, “people will get hurt when s---t falls on them. They will get just as hurt and just as killed as if they’d been hit with something big and heavy, say a car. Should anyone in our story have the misfortune to fall off a roof, or out of a window, they won’t bounce. They will die.”