X-Men: Apocalypse spoilers, duh.
Wolverine’s role in X-Men: Apocalypse wasn't confirmed until the last trailer hit. Wolverine’s claws popped out of nowhere, like Spider-Man’s superhero landing in the Captain America: Civil War. While Hugh Jackman doesn’t end up getting much screen time in the movie, he shows up just in time to slay countless heads in the halls of the Weapon X facility. Turns out, Simon Kinberg initially had a much larger role in mind.
“There were a lot of iterations of how Wolverine would enter and exit the movie. There was a version when he was going to come in at the midpoint of the film and be like the drill sergeant for the kids and take over as their leader. And we felt like that stepped on Jen’s role in the movie and becoming their leader,” Kinberg told Cinema Blend.
With Mystique now in the spotlight, Kinberg and Bryan Singer decided to save Wolverine’s screen time for Jackman’s final run with the claws in Wolverine 3.
“As we were, again, conceptually brainstorming the script, we knew that the kids were going to be abducted, or that a lot of our main characters were going to be abducted and taken somewhere. So we thought it would be interesting to take them to Alkali Lake, and that they would naturally, potentially… that the Weapon X program would be there, and maybe that was a place to find Wolverine,” Kinberg said.
But how did Wolverine get to Weapon X? Destiny... because time corrects itself according to Kinberg.
“One of the things we talk about in Days of Future Past - there’s a scene where Hank/Beast talks about the immutability of time. Basically, you can change the way the future goes, but it finds its way back. So while we don’t show how, it found its way back to Wolverine being part of Weapon X and under the thumb of Stryker, that’s the idea.”
While we respect the creative vision, that answer still isn’t very satisfying considering the X-Men franchise’s history of complicated timelines and insoluble science. The real answer is probably waiting for us in The Wolverine sequel, which hits theaters March 3, 2017.
Would you have liked to see more Wolverine in X-Men: Apocalypse ? Sound off in the comments below!
