The X-Men have a wide array of colorful characters, and Disney will have a lot to choose from when they first introduce them to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there is one character that fans know will be quite challenging to recast. Wolverine has been played by Hugh Jackman ever since the first X-Men film, and he brought the character's arc to a brilliant and tear-jerking conclusion in Logan. The franchise has gone through all kinds of different continuities, thanks to the introduction of time travel, but the story of Wolverine has a definite beginning, middle, and end, so let's take a look at the explanation of it.
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00:00Making sense of the X-Men timeline can be complicated.
00:03But when you focus just on Wolverine, the story gets a little easier to follow.
00:08From his bloody origin tale to his fateful final movie, here's Wolverine's cinematic
00:12story explained.
00:14The first chronological glimpse we get of the boy who grows up to become Wolverine is
00:18in 2009's X-Men Origins Wolverine, where we learn that his name isn't Logan at all.
00:25It's James Howlett.
00:26Logan is actually the surname of the man who murders James' father in 1845, which causes
00:32James' mutation to activate, pushing bone claws out from between his knuckles.
00:37Enraged, James kills Logan, only to almost immediately learn that the man was actually
00:43his biological father.
00:45Young James flees his home along with his half-brother, Victor Creed, who possesses
00:49the same mutant healing ability as James.
00:52That healing factor not only makes the boys practically impossible to kill, but also slows
00:57their aging, keeping them looking relatively youthful as they fight side-by-side through
01:01every major war over the next hundred years.
01:05In 2013's The Wolverine, we see that he spent some of his time in a Japanese POW camp in
01:111945.
01:12While he's there, James saves the life of Japanese officer Ichiro Yashida from the bombing
01:17of Nagasaki, an event which will prove important many years later.
01:22In X-Men First Class, Charles Xavier and Eric Lyncher, soon to be known as Professor X and
01:27Magneto, find themselves up against Nazi mutant Sebastian Shaw and his team of super-powered
01:33henchmen.
01:34Realizing they'll need some help to bring Shaw down, the duo uses Cerebro to find new
01:38mutants and form a team of their own.
01:40So in a zippy montage set in 1962, they recruit a handful of young mutants who wind up as
01:47the, well, first class of X-Men.
01:50Not everyone is eager to join up, though.
01:52When Eric and Charles walk into a bar, a cigar-smoking James Howlett tells them that he's not interested,
01:58using some language that ensured the movie would be a hard PG-13.
02:03While fighting together in the Vietnam War, an increasingly violent Victor assaults a
02:07woman and then kills the officer who tries to intervene.
02:11James rushes to his brother's aid without realizing what he's done, and both are sentenced
02:15to die by firing squad.
02:18Needless to say, the execution doesn't go according to plan.
02:21Their miraculous survival catches the eye of Major William Stryker, and Victor and James
02:26are recruited to his black ops team of mutants, Team X, which also includes a version of Wade
02:31Wilson, better known as Deadpool, that we all do our best to just not talk about.
02:35Hey!
02:36It's me!
02:37Don't scratch!
02:38It's at this point that James starts going by the alias Logan, after the father he killed
02:43so many decades before.
02:45Logan and Victor work with Team X for several years, but ultimately Logan decides he can
02:50no longer stomach the team's callous disdain for human life.
02:54He quits Team X, but Victor decides to stay, and the two part ways.
02:59Six years after walking away from Team X, Logan is working as a lumberjack in the Canadian
03:04Rockies, but is pulled back into Stryker's world after Victor murders Logan's girlfriend,
03:09Kayla Silverfox.
03:11Stryker tells him Victor has gone rogue, and he asks Logan to join the Weapon X program,
03:16giving him a chance to get his revenge on Victor by undergoing an experimental procedure
03:20that will fuse an unbreakable metal called adamantium to his skeleton.
03:25Wolverine agrees, after requesting new dog tags with the alias Wolverine.
03:30Thanks to the healing factor that allows him to survive, the procedure is a success.
03:35Stryker never intended to let Logan go free once it was completed, but Logan manages to
03:39escape.
03:40When he learns that Victor is kidnapping young mutants for Stryker, Logan returns to
03:44free them and get his revenge.
03:46The young mutants are flown to safety by Charles Xavier while Logan and Victor fight, first
03:51against each other, then together against Deadpool.
03:54Once Wade is defeated, Victor leaves, but before Logan can get out, Stryker shoots him
03:59in the head with an adamantium bullet.
04:01Logan survives, but when he regains consciousness, he can't remember his past.
04:06Set in the year 2003, X-Men reveals Logan living as a cage fighter in Canada, still
04:11missing most of his memories but using the alias Wolverine, thanks to the dog tags he
04:16got from Weapon X.
04:18He meets young mutant runaway Rogue, and they're attacked on the road by Victor, who's now
04:22called Sabretooth.
04:23Curiously, neither brother seems to have any memory of the other, and unlike Wolverine,
04:29Sabretooth looks like a completely different person now.
04:31While Sabretooth has the upper hand, Wolverine and Rogue are rescued by Storm and Cyclops
04:36and taken to Charles Xavier's mansion, where they join the X-Men.
04:40Together with the X-Men, Wolverine fights Magneto and his brotherhood of mutants.
04:44The bad guys want to use Rogue's abilities to power a device that will turn baseline
04:48humans into mutants in response to a proposed law that would require mutants to register
04:53with the government.
04:54The X-Men manage to foil Magneto's plot, overcoming both the brotherhood and some pretty rough
04:59dialogue.
05:00You know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning?
05:02The same thing that happens to everything else."
05:07The X-Men's victory leads to Magneto's imprisonment, but the tension between mutants and humans
05:11remains.
05:12Occurring not long after the events of X-Men, X2 X-Men United opens with a mutant assassination
05:18attempt on the President of the United States, causing relations between mutants and the
05:23U.S. government to become rockier than ever.
05:26William Stryker, now much older than the last time we saw him, receives permission from
05:30the President to investigate Xavier, but it's really a ruse so that Stryker can force
05:34Xavier to use Cerebro to destroy all mutants.
05:38The X-Men travel to Stryker's base underneath an abandoned military installation, and when
05:43Logan enters the room where he received his adamantium skeleton, some of his memories
05:47return.
05:48He attacks Stryker, demanding to know why the military man did this to him, and he's
05:52shocked when Stryker reveals that Logan volunteered for the Weapon X program.
05:57Logan refrains from killing his old foe, but Stryker ultimately meets his end when
06:01a nearby dam bursts, drowning him.
06:03Meanwhile, the X-Men have managed to overcome both Stryker's people and Magneto, who tried
06:08to double-cross them.
06:09In the process, their plane is damaged, leading Jean Grey, with whom Logan has fallen in love,
06:14to telekinetically lift the plane to safety while holding back the lake.
06:18Once her team is safe, she gets swept away by the rushing water.
06:22At the beginning of X-Men The Last Stand, set in 2006, Cyclops goes to visit what he
06:27thinks is Jean's final resting place.
06:30But she's not dead.
06:32Naturally, he's overjoyed to learn that she's still alive, but his delight is short-lived
06:36when Jean unceremoniously… kills him.
06:39Xavier sends Logan and Storm to investigate, and they're horrified to learn that Jean has
06:44been taken over by a destructive power called the Phoenix.
06:47Meanwhile, a so-called cure for mutants has been discovered, and Magneto rebuilds his
06:52Brotherhood of Mutants to oppose it.
06:54Feeling betrayed by Xavier, who suppressed the Phoenix when she was a child, Jean kills
06:58her mentor and joins with Magneto, but don't worry, Xavier is only mostly dead.
07:05Magneto and the Brotherhood attack the lab where the cure is held, but during the battle,
07:08Jean loses control of the Phoenix and begins indiscriminately destroying everything around
07:13her.
07:14Thanks to his healing ability, Logan is the only one who's able to get close to Jean.
07:18In a moment of lucidity, she asks Logan to save her, and he claws into her chest, killing
07:23her and ending the destruction.
07:25I love you.
07:30Set in 2013, The Wolverine finds Logan back in the Canadian wilderness, still agonizing
07:36over killing Jean, when he's contacted on behalf of Ichiro Yashida, the man he saved
07:41back in 1945.
07:43The message is delivered by Yukio, a mutant who has the ability to foresee people's deaths,
07:48and who has had a vision about Wolverine.
07:51I see you on your back.
07:54There's blood everywhere.
07:56You're holding your own heart in your hand.
08:01While in Japan, Logan realizes that Yashida didn't ask him there to say farewell.
08:06Instead, he wants to steal Logan's immortality and live forever.
08:11Logan loses his adamantium claws battling Yashida, but he manages to defeat him using
08:15his regenerated bone claws.
08:18After the fight, Logan leaves Japan, accompanied by Yukio.
08:21In a mid-credits scene set two years later, Magneto and a very much alive Charles Xavier
08:26approach Logan in an airport to tell him of a new threat to wipe out all mutants.
08:32X-Men Days of Future Past opens in the year 2023, when mutants have been driven to near
08:37extinction by the robotic Sentinels.
08:40Along with Xavier, Storm, and Magneto, Logan — who miraculously has his adamantium claws
08:45back — has managed to elude the Sentinels long enough to form a plan.
08:49With the future already beyond repair, they decide to use Kitty Pryde's mutant ability
08:54to send Logan's consciousness back to 1973 to stop the events that led to the creation
08:59of the Sentinels in the first place, kind of like in the first Terminator.
09:03They hope that, if he's successful, the timeline will reset, placing them all in an alternate
09:08version of 2023.
09:10Using his 1973 body piloted by his 2023 consciousness, Logan joins forces with the younger Xavier
09:17and his X-Men to prevent the assassination that paves the way for the Sentinel program.
09:22Although Logan succeeds in his mission, he's horribly injured in the process, with his
09:26mangled body sinking to the bottom of the Potomac River.
09:29However, Logan's 2023 consciousness doesn't stick around long enough to learn how he survives.
09:35As soon as he changes the future, he returns to an alternate 2023.
09:39In this new timeline, Logan is now a teacher in Xavier's school, where many of the X-Men
09:44who died in the primary timeline are now alive again, including Jean Grey.
09:49After completing his mission in days of future past, Logan's maimed body is recovered by
09:54a team led by a person who appears to be Stryker, but is revealed to be Mystique.
09:59In X-Men Apocalypse, it seems that Logan somehow wound up back under the real Stryker's control
10:04anyway.
10:05In yet another new timeline, he never escaped the Weapon X program after gaining his adamantium
10:11skeleton in 1979.
10:13The X-Men come upon this alternate version of Logan, who's still being called Weapon
10:17X and has no memory of his true identity, when they infiltrate Stryker's facility in
10:221983.
10:23After Wolverine slaughters many of Stryker's soldiers, Jean Grey manages to restore some
10:28of his memories.
10:30Logan runs out into the cold, and Cyclops speculates that they'll never see him again.
10:34Presumably, Jean's intervention paves the way for Logan to still join the X-Men at some
10:38point down the road, leading to the happy timeline we saw in Days of Future Past.
10:43Or maybe not.
10:45The Wolverine we meet in Logan is a much older, more beaten-down version of the character
10:49than moviegoers had seen before.
10:52After living for nearly two centuries, Logan's healing ability is finally beginning to fail,
10:57and he's growing increasingly ill from adamantium poisoning.
11:01This future version of Logan is working as a limo driver and caring for an ailing Charles
11:05Xavier, and he carries around an adamantium bullet pondering the possibility of ending
11:10his own life.
11:11Despite the happy future Logan returned to at the end of Days of Future Past, we learn
11:16that most mutants, including the X-Men, have been wiped out anyway.
11:20It wasn't the government this time, though.
11:22A few years before the start of the film, Xavier lost control of his powers and inadvertently
11:27killed the rest of the X-Men, a fact which Logan remembers, but Charles has mercifully
11:32forgotten.
11:33I did something.
11:38Something unspeakable.
11:41In 2029, Logan encounters a young girl named Laura, whose powers mirror his own.
11:46This kid is determined to get to a mutant sanctuary in North Dakota called Eden.
11:51Charles persuades Logan to take her there, and the three embark on the journey together.
11:56Along the way, they learn that Laura was created using Logan's DNA as part of the villainous
12:00Transigen program.
12:02Unfortunately, that DNA was also used to create X-24, a vicious clone that looks exactly like
12:08Logan did in his prime.
12:11Before they can reach Eden, X-24 kills Charles, but Logan and Laura manage to escape.
12:16Laura convinces Logan to continue on to Eden, and when they get there, they find the other
12:21mutant children who've escaped Transigen.
12:23Laura and the kids make plans to escape into Canada, but before they can, they're attacked
12:27by Transigen soldiers and X-24.
12:30The children defeat the soldiers, but Logan is no match for his new and improved clone,
12:35who impales him on a fallen tree.
12:37Before X-24 can finish him off, Laura shoots him in the head with Logan's adamantium bullet.
12:42Logan dies holding Laura's hand, metaphorically fulfilling Yukio's vision that he would die
12:46with his heart in his hand.
12:49Laura and the other mutant children escape to Canada, leaving behind Wolverine's grave,
12:53which is marked with an X.