Few heroes have been rewritten as often as Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. He began as an amnesiac cage fighter, and the films have since given him a childhood, a family and a second chance in the MCU. The question is live again because “Avengers: Doomsday” arrives on December 18th. Disney’s cast list for it names X-Men actors such as Ian McKellen and James Marsden but not Jackman.
Here is Logan’s whole life on screen, in story order. Each film changes what the next one can do with him. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”, “X-Men”, “X2”, “X-Men: The Last Stand”, “The Wolverine”, “X-Men: First Class”, “X-Men: Days of Future Past”, “X-Men: Apocalypse”, “Logan” and “Deadpool & Wolverine”.
He began as an amnesiac cage fighter, and the films have since given him a childhood, a family and a second chance in the MCU.”
The story starts in 1845. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” opens with a sick boy named James Howlett, who sees his father killed and grows bone claws in his rage. The man he kills turns out to be his real father. James runs off with his half-brother Victor Creed and their healing factors carry them through more than a century of wars. After Vietnam, Major William Stryker recruits them into a team of mutant soldiers. James later takes the name Logan from the man he killed.
Stryker’s second offer comes years later. He tells Logan that a procedure can make him strong enough to stop Victor. The procedure bonds a metal called adamantium to his skeleton under a program named Weapon X. It works, but Stryker never meant to let him go. In the end a shot to the head with an adamantium bullet leaves Logan alive and amnesiac, with only fragments of his old life.
“X-Men” begins with that memory loss. Logan is a cage fighter in Canada who meets a runaway named Rogue and ends up at Charles Xavier’s school. He joins the team against Magneto but still has no past to go on. In “X2” the trail leads to Stryker’s base at Alkali Lake, where Logan finds the place he was made and some memories return. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) appears to die saving the team, and Logan has fallen for her.
“X-Men: The Last Stand” brings her back as the Phoenix, a second personality that Xavier had walled off in her mind. Logan can get close because his healing factor repairs the damage as she destroys everything around her. In the end he is the one who kills her. “The Wolverine” starts in the shadow of that, with Logan still haunted by Jean as he travels to Japan at the request of a dying tycoon named Ichirō Yashida. He once saved Yashida’s life at Nagasaki in 1945, when he was a prisoner of war and the atomic bomb fell.
Yashida’s gratitude hides an offer, because he wants Logan’s healing factor for himself and a device implanted in Logan dulls it. A mutant named Yukio, who can see how people die, tells Logan she has seen his death. By the end he has fought the Silver Samurai and lost his adamantium claws. A scene after the credits sets up “Days of Future Past”, with Magneto and a living Xavier warning him in an airport of a threat to all mutants.
The “X-Men: First Class” cameo is one scene. In 1962, Xavier and Magneto try to recruit a stranger in a bar and he refuses with a profanity. The appearance is uncredited, and Jackman has called it his favorite Wolverine moment, according to ComicBook.com. “X-Men: Days of Future Past” puts him at the center. In a future hunted by Sentinel robots, Kitty Pryde sends his mind back to 1973 to stop their creation. He succeeds and wakes in a changed present where Xavier’s school is thriving and both Jean and Cyclops are alive.
“X-Men: Apocalypse” gives him another cameo, and it rewrites his past. In 1983 the young Jean Grey, Cyclops and Nightcrawler sneak into Stryker’s base at Alkali Lake and open a cage holding Weapon X. The man inside has no memory and cuts through the guards in a rage. Jean calms him and restores a few memories, and he runs off into the wilderness. In the old timeline Logan had already escaped Stryker. Here he is still a prisoner, so the Weapon X story now has two versions.
“Logan” is the outlier. It is set in 2029 and mutants are nearly gone. Logan’s healing is failing and adamantium is poisoning him. He drives a limousine and cares for a sick Xavier until a girl named Laura (Dafne Keen) turns up with powers like his own. Transigen, the company hunting her, made her from Logan’s DNA. She wants to reach a refuge called Eden, and Logan agrees to take her there.
The road ends at Eden, where other Transigen children are waiting. X-24 is a younger clone of Logan who kills Xavier along the way and attacks the children with Transigen’s soldiers. In the woods he impales Logan on a fallen tree. Laura kills the clone with an adamantium bullet, and Logan dies with her beside him, saying “So this is what it feels like.” The children bury him and Laura tips his wooden cross onto its side to make an X. The ending echoes Yukio’s prediction that he would die with his heart in his hand. In “Logan” it is his daughter’s hand he holds.
Where “Logan” sits in the timeline is still argued. Director James Mangold told ComicBook.com that he chose 2029 to get “far enough past” the epilogue of “Days of Future Past” and clear of “existing entanglements.” Popverse reports that Jackman once said the film was set in a separate timeline before Mangold said it shares the continuity of the others. TheWrap’s answer was “neither”, calling it closer to a “What If” story. It adds that the film still nods to the Statue of Liberty fight in “X-Men” and to “The Wolverine”, events that “Days of Future Past” may have erased.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” opens at Logan’s grave. Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) digs up the body, which is only an adamantium skeleton, hoping Wolverine’s healing factor has kept him alive. The Time Variance Authority comes to arrest him there. The reason he is digging comes from the TVA’s Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), who has told him that his universe is dying because Logan was its “Anchor Being”, the one figure whose death dooms a world. With a TemPad swiped from Paradox, Wade searches the multiverse for another Wolverine. The variants he meets include one played by Henry Cavill.
Wade settles on a Logan who has let down his own world, and the label that follows him is “the worst Wolverine.” In his universe the X-Men were killed by humans while he was away. He wears the yellow suit his teammates once begged him to put on. Paradox rejects the swap, and the two are sent to the Void, a wasteland ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin). They get home through a portal, destroy the Time Ripper and save the timeline. In the end the variant stays on in Wade’s universe.
Disney’s cast list for “Avengers: Doomsday” also names Rebecca Romijn, Alan Cumming, Kelsey Grammer and Channing Tatum, and Hugh Jackman is not on it. Disney+ says some cast members “remain a mystery.” Anthony Russo said “We have absolutely not announced the entire cast”, D23 reports. In August Jackman appeared in a video at D23 asking Kevin Feige whether he needed help “rounding out the cast”, according to the Press Association. Disney+ also lists “X-Men”, “X2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” in its countdown to the film. “Logan” is not on that list.
That leaves a continuity problem the films cannot answer yet. The Fox-era Logan died in 2029, and the man who took his place in Wade’s universe has a different past. Marvel’s own “X-Men” film is set for May 5th, 2028, and the cast announced at D23 does not include a Wolverine. If Jackman is in “Doomsday”, the film has to say which Wolverine he is. If he is not, the franchise still has no answer for who carries the claws next.
What Do You Think? Which Wolverine is the real one: the cage fighter in “X-Men”, the old man in “Logan” or the variant from “Deadpool & Wolverine”? Should Jackman return in “Avengers: Doomsday”, or should the claws go to a new actor? And does “Logan” still feel like the right ending?
Catch up properly: every MCU movie and show in chronological order on the MCU+ Universe Tree.
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