WOLVERINE (In Development)

• WOLVERINE TO BE UNLIKE ANY OTHER COMIC FILM?

Wolverine is Hugh Jackman

Will The Wolverine be ready to go before cameras next year, director James Mangold spoke with The Playlist about his plans for the sequel to the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

“You could actually just tell a story about this amazing character from the start, just the way they do when you really read a comic,” Mangold said via telephone Friday. “You don’t have to spend the first hour saying how they were born; you can actually just find them in an emotional space, in the middle of action, and what happens is you’re not crowded with cutting to nine other action heroes. You can really make a movie about this dude.”

"It's a kind of adventure following such a unique character also in a really unique environment," he says of his reasons for taking the job. "I mean, the fact that half of the characters in this movie speak Japanese, this is like a foreign-language superhero movie that's as much a drama and a detective story and a film noir, with high-octane action as it is anything like a conventional tentpole film."

Mangold also explains that he's discussed the project with the formerly-attached Darren Aronofsky and that, while the film still features Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay, he and Mark Bomback have gone through and rewritten the entire thing, comparing the version he plans to make to classics like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Chinatown.

"[It's] much more about Logan getting lost in this very unique and insulated world of Japanese culture, gangster culture, and ninja culture," he explains. "The fighting is going to be unique because it's all influenced by Japanese martial arts... I think more than anything, it's a character piece, asking really interesting questions that are what pulled me in about what it means to be immortal. What is it to live forever, when you lose everyone you've ever loved? Either you watch them get killed, or you just lose them by attrition. What is it to feel the burden of saving mankind through all of its mistakes, over and over and over again? What's the toll it takes on you as a living being that is somehow living this Frankensteinian, eternal life?"

“I like to think that we’re out to make that Wolverine movie that people have been looking forward to seeing, which takes on some of the darker and more intense aspects of the character, and his own journey, that have not necessarily been possible in the origin story that they did or obviously when he’s sharing so much time as a character with so many others in X-Men.”

Well it definitely seems that the Wolverine is getting closer and closer to going into production, hopefully the film will start shooting next year for a 2013 release.