Hugh Jackman: ‘Logan’ Is Set In A Different ‘X-Men’ Universe

With Logan, Hugh Jackman wanted to make something very different. That’s hardly surprising considering that this doesn’t just mark the ninth time that the Australian actor has portrayed the mutant in the X-Men universe, but it was also planned to be his final outing, too.

Whether or not Logan will actually be Jackman’s farewell to Wolverine remains to be seen, especially since anticipation for the film is currently at a fever pitch. This excitement has been generated because of the fact that Logan has been made with an R-rating in mind, which will invariably set it apart from the previous outings that Hugh Jackman has made as Wolverine.

But now Hugh Jackman has revealed that there’s another reason why Logan won’t fit into the X-Men franchise’s previous installment. That’s because Jackman has admitted that Logan is actually set in a different timeline to the other X-Men films, the last of which was 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse.

Hugh Jackman made this admission to Digital Spy, declaring that all will become clear when audiences finally get to see the film,

“When you see the full movie you’ll understand. Not only is it different in terms of timeline and tone, it’s a slightly different universe. It’s actually a different paradigm and that will become clear.”

Hugh Jackman is clearly rather enthused about the possibilities that were opened up by Logan not being “beholden to times and story lines in the other movies,” which he insists made it “very different and very fresh” as well as a “stand alone movie in many ways.” At the same time, though, director James Mangold, Jackman himself, producers Simon Kinberg, Hutch Parker, and Lauren Schuler Donner, as well as writers Michael Green, Mangold, and Scott Frank, looked to include some semblance of a crossover in Logan by asking Patrick Stewart to reprise his character of Professor X for the seventh time.

Hugh Jackman also confessed that trying to fit Logan into the X-Men universe would have been near to impossible, because it has now become some convoluted. Hugh Jackman stopped short, and even went out of his way to insist that he wasn’t criticizing the X-Men universe, but did note that trying to fold Logan into it could have been detriment to the story,

“[Following the timelines] becomes a chess game that you try to serve, which actually doesn’t help to tell a story and it’s sort of been a bit all over the place. I’m not critical of it – X-Men was the first movie really in comic book, no one thought there’d be another and there were different directors different off shoots.”

Hugh Jackman also opened up about how simple it was for him to be given free reign with Logan. In fact, all Hugh Jackman needed to do was inform the powers that be over at 20th Century Fox that this would be his last outing as Wolverine.

They then told Jackman he could make the movie he wanted. Jackman continued,

“And so Jim [Mangold] and I had this blank canvas and we wanted to make something really different. Definitely tonally different, I kept thinking The Wrestler, Unforgiven. He was thinking Unforgiven as well and The Gauntlet and these other movies which just seemed to really match his character. Early on we had the idea for the title not having anything to do with Wolverine in it but just being about the man. And what the collateral damage of being Wolverine your entire life would be.”

We’ll finally get to see how these influences merge together when Logan is released into cinemas on March 3, 2017.

[Featured Image by 20th Century Fox]