Taking over from departing director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler), Knight and Day director James Mangold has been put in charge of helming The Wolverine; the latest installment in the X-Men spin-off franchise; and recently let The Playlist know just what he’s got planned for the next big-screen outing of everyone’s favourtie mutant.
Believing that jumping onboard to take charge of a sequel is more of a blessing than a curse; stating that as “it isn’t an origin story” he’s “freed from that burden”, and also doesn’t have to produce a “save-the-world movie”; Mangold is looking forward to filming “a character piece which actually has more in common with The Outlaw Josey Wales and Chinatown” than most superhero follow-ons.
James has also been heavily involved in the script; “there’s not a page that hasn’t been re-worked and re-though”; yet despite the heavy re-writes, The Wolverine will still be based on the 1982, Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, mini-series which takes Logan (the titular mutant who will once again be portrayed by Hugh Jackman) to Japan, and will see him “getting lost in these very insulated worlds of Japanese culture, gangster culture, and ninja culture”, as he falls for the daughter of a Yakuza family.
Dubbing The Wolverine “a foreign-language superhero movie”; due to the fact that “the fighting is all influenced by Japanese martial arts”, “half of the characters in the movie speak Japanese”, and “it’s as much a drama and a detective story and a film noir as it is anything like a conventional tentpole film”; James Mangold, Hugh Jackman, and the rest of the cast are scheduled to begin shooting next spring, ahead of a 2013 release.
Matt Wheeldon.
Source: The Playlist.
