‘Wolverine 3’ Asks “Where Are All the Mutants?”

“Where are all the mutants?” 

That’s the question scrawled on a bathroom stall in a tantalizing new shot from Logan.

Director James Mangold has teased the third Wolverine film film will feature an older Logan, whose mutant healing power is on the decline, and this new bit of information suggests perhaps Logan is among the last of his kind (we also know Patrick Stewart’s aged Prof. X will be in the film). 

 

Mutants

A photo posted by @wponx on Oct 14, 2016 at 7:23am PDT

There’s plenty of precedent for this in the comics, with the famous 2005 “House of M” storyline culminating with mutantkind being decimated when the Scarlett Witch utters the words “No more mutants” — rendering most of the world’s mutant population powerless. That action shaped the Marvel Universe for years, providing a backdrop for fascinating stories in which the X-Men and remaining mutants must deal with a world in which they literally were an endangered species. Though this surely won’t be covered in the film, it even saw Cyclops become a radicalized mutant leader akin to Magneto. 

For Logan, having Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) live in a world in which he’s part of a dying breed offers exciting storytelling possibilities. This truly could be the gritty, R-rated western we’ve been promised. Wolverine, with diminished powers himself and likely without other mutants to fight, really could become like a classic western hero — facing off against other humans, not improbable villains with seemingly every mutant power in existence (see: X-Men Origins: Wolverine) or an old man in a suit powered by adamantium (The Wolverine). He’ll face off against Narcos star Boyd Holbrook, who is playing the villain Donald Pierce. 

Previous teases of the film have been gritty and even disturbing, and Mangold’s release of a script page last week has promised as much. 

“Basically, if you’re on the make for a hyper choreographed, gravity defying, city-block destroying CG f–kathon, this ain’t your movie,” reads a page from the script. “In this flick, people get hurt or killed when shit falls on them. They will get just as hurt or just as killed if they get hit with something big and heavy, like, say, a car. Should anyone in our story have the misfortune to fall off a roof or out a window, they won’t bounce. They will die.”

Logan is set for March 3, 2017. 

Related Stories

Related Story

100 Greatest Superhero Comics