The R-Rated Wolverine We Almost Got |
Sometimes, when filmmakers swing for the fences, they don't quite hit a home run. In the case of 2013's The Wolverine, it certainly wasn't a lack of directorial ambition that got in the way.
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00:00 Sometimes, when filmmakers swing for the fences, they don't quite hit a home run. In the
00:04 case of 2013's The Wolverine, it certainly wasn't a lack of directorial ambition that
00:09 got in the way.
00:10 Have you ever wondered how filmmakers got from the hot mess that is director Gavin Hood's
00:14 X-Men Origins Wolverine to the soulful elegy that is director James Mangold's Logan?
00:19 The answer is Mangold's second entry in the Wolverine trilogy, The Wolverine. Loosely
00:23 based on Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's limited 1982 comic book arc about Wolverine's
00:27 adventures in Japan, The Wolverine lies precisely at the nexus between Hood's Wolverine origin
00:32 story and Logan. It's more meditative than the former, yet less sophisticated and bloody
00:37 than the latter. It also has some of the silly CGI violence that dilutes Hood's film, but
00:41 is absent from Mangold's final chapter in the saga.
00:44 Mangold and his leading man Hugh Jackman had hoped to make The Wolverine the first R-rated
00:48 X-Men film. Speaking with Den of Geek in 2017, Mangold explained that receiving an R rating
00:53 would come with a lot of benefits, creatively. And it didn't just come down to Jackman getting
00:57 to swear more. Rather, they felt that being able to market the film toward an adult audience
01:01 would give them the power to make a more impactful movie. He explained,
01:04 "The scenes can go deeper and can be written for adults. Not just language, not just violence,
01:09 but the themes can be more interesting. The words you're using can be more complicated.
01:13 The ideas can be more complicated."
01:15 So why was The Wolverine released with a PG-13 rating instead? As Mangold tells it, it was
01:20 all a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the history of superhero
01:24 films.
01:25 "Hey, something's done right."
01:26 During The Wolverine, you get a sense of the film Mangold wanted to make. Its story is
01:30 all about death and mortality. Logan spends the majority of the film tortured by the memory
01:34 of the late Jean Grey. And when he returns to Japan, it's at the behest of a now-elderly
01:38 man he saved during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, back when he was imprisoned at a
01:42 Japanese POW camp during World War II.
01:45 Upon revisiting the country, Logan is flooded with memories of the pain and suffering he
01:49 witnessed there. Even with some extraneous X-Men characters thrown into the mix, the
01:53 first two-thirds of the film unfolds as a neo-noir drama set in a world of mutants.
01:57 Only during the third act does The Wolverine become more of a typical superhero film, complete
02:01 with a giant CGI opponent for Logan to punch. When interviewed by Den of Geek, Mangold didn't
02:06 deny the third-act tonal shift was 20th Century Fox's doing. The problem was that PG-13,
02:11 CGI-heavy superhero films were all the rage when The Wolverine came out in 2013. So that's
02:16 exactly what Fox wanted him to make.
02:18 The irony, of course, is that it was the leftover elements from Mangold's original vision that
02:22 allowed the film to better stand out from the rest of the crowd. He explained,
02:25 "The thing the studio was most worried about, which was this kind of Hong Kong crime movie,
02:30 this kind of Japanese noir I was making, was almost our best asset."
02:34 Mangold would eventually release an extended cut titled The Wolverine Unleashed Extended
02:37 Edition, but even that wasn't a true reflection of what he'd hoped to do, because he had crafted
02:42 the film knowing he'd most likely have to edit it down for a PG-13 audience. Most of
02:47 the extra material in the extended cut only serves to make The Wolverine more adult on
02:50 a superficial level. It wasn't until he and co-writer Scott Frank got the go-ahead to
02:54 treat Logan as an R-rated project that Mangold really got to make the grittier and more mature
02:58 Wolverine film he'd had in mind.
03:00 For as much as Logan undoubtedly benefited from the success of the R-rated Deadpool a
03:04 year before its release, Mangold told Den of Geek he suspected a change behind the scenes
03:08 was a big help as well. He reflected,
03:10 "The people running Fox now have a clearer understanding that their audiences have changed.
03:14 I don't think when I made The Wolverine, I had gone as far as I have on this film. I
03:18 think times have changed now."
03:19 Ten years out from the original release of The Wolverine, that's only become doubly true.
03:24 2023 alone has seen multiple superhero films misfire financially, resulting in some of
03:29 the costliest box office flops of all time. Even DC Studios co-head James Gunn admitted
03:34 on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast he thinks superhero films have become
03:38 way too unadventurous over the last decade. It's high past time for studios to truly shake
03:43 things up once more, before the genre fades out of style completely.
03:46 (music)