James Mangold

If anything, we can expect James Mangold’s Logan will be a departure from the rest of the X-Men franchise. A new mysterious clip dropped by 20th Century Fox today gives fans a little taste of what Hugh Jackman’s next outing as Wolverine will be like.

It’s been rumored for some time that Hugh Jackman’s big Wolverine farewell might very well receive an R-rating, and the massive success of Deadpool only strengthened that possibility. Up until now, however, it was unclear if Logan would actually hit theaters with an R — not for lack of trying, as both Jackman and director James Mangold have expressed an interest in delivering the red-band goods. And it looks like they’ve done just that.

The most jarring line in the new trailer for James Mangold’s increasingly buzzy Wolverine spinoff Logan comes when the gruff mutant informs his young charge, “This is the real world. People die.” He tells her this after seeing one of her vintage X-Men comic books, and informing her that the team’s actual exploits bear little resemblance to what’s on the page. It all sends a clear message: this is a film unlike the solo Wolverine pictures that came before it, distinctive both in its high stakes and self-awareness. It’s a sharply written moment, but the new clip doesn’t linger on it for too long before getting to the good stuff — in this instance, a young girl cutting off an adult man’s hands.

Logan looks like no other superhero movie we’ve ever seen before, and Hugh Jackman and James Mangold have been especially plugging its desolate, dingy look. They’ve given us image after image, all of which have kept this really great post-apocalyptic western look. Today, They’ve given us one more in preparation for tomorrow’s new trailer, which Jackman seems very excited about.

While we’ve known for a while that Logan would probably be the last appearance of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, we sometimes undersell how much of a landmark that truly is. Jackman was one of the first actors to make a long-term commitment to playing a superhero; furthermore, he’s one of the few actors who actually retired from the character rather than being replaced or rebooted by the studio. What Jackman has gone through in the past few years should help set the stage for the current generation of Marvel actors, people like Robert Downey, Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson who will likely step down from a role rather than have it taken from them.

If you’ve spent the past few weeks caught up in holiday and family time, you might have missed the announcement that Cliff Martinez would no longer be writing the music for Logan, ostensibly the final movie in Hugh Jackman’s decades-long run as Wolverine. As pointed out by sites like Birth.Movies.Death, at some point in the last few months, director James Mangold had quietly brought back Marco Beltrami, the composer from 2013’s The Wolverine, to bang out a soundtrack for the March release. And now, thanks to the director’s Twitter account, we’ve got our first look (listen?) at the music for Logan

Since the earliest news that James Mangold would direct a spinoff about Wolverine surfaced, anticipation has been high. But even as the film gained a cast, a title, a release date, and a trailer, the many fans impatiently awaiting Logan didn’t know what the film was about, not really anyway. It was understood from the jump that Mangold had drawn influence from Mark Millar’s fan-favorite run of Wolverine comics titled “Old Man Logan” for the film. Even then, however, public knowledge of its premise was spotty at best beyond “Hugh Jackman, long in the tooth, prowls around a post-apocalyptic future.”

With buzz reaching fever-pitch levels a full three months before the March 3 release date, James Mangold’s Logan could very well be the first true Event Film of the year. His sparse, dystopian, Western-tinged reinterpretation of the X-Men mythos has fans tittering with great expectations, and the Johnny Cash-scored trailer teased a performance of unprecedented toughness from Hugh Jackman as a battle-scarred Wolverine. A new batch of supporting characters also goosed the expectations of comics diehards, learning that they could expect to see the young X-23, Reaver leader Donald Pierce, and Morlock member Caliban. Today brings an eye-opening first look at Stephen Merchant as Caliban, and fittingly so, those eyes are mutated and inhuman.

Another day, another movie image. This time, it’s another artfully composed photo from the set of Logan, showing an older Wolverine walking around the side of a car. It’s a really gorgeous image, the colored lighting and vibrant sunset in the background evoking a kind of neo-noir feel — which is good new for those of us who wish superhero movies would try venturing into other genres every once in a while.

It’s tougher than it seems for a superhero movie to get an R rating. These days, most of them fall somewhere around the PG-13 spectrum, which allows teen audiences easy access to the comic book movies usually geared toward them, as well as families to bring the smaller kids whose favorite toy is their oversize talking Hulk hands. But Logan is a superhero movie of a different sort, so it needs a rating that puts it in a different category from the other X-Men movies. To achieve that R rating, probably through violence and language, the star Hugh Jackman apparently took a pay cut so that the film could get there.