When Hugh Jackman bid farewell to his iconic role as Wolverine in the 2017 flick Logan, fans were struck by a bittersweet feeling. The movie proved to be an appropriate goodbye to the much-loved character, revealing a more vulnerable and emotional side to the clawed mutant. However, what many fans might not know is that The Wolverine couldn’t have taken place if Fox had adhered to their original plan to have Darren Aronofsky helm the 2013 flick.
The Wolverine, a sequel to X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), was originally slated to be directed by Aronofsky, who is best known for his dark and intense movies like Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. But, as fate would have it, the director eventually dropped out of the project in order to allow James Mangold to step in and take the reins.
The Directorial Switch-Up: When Darren Aronofsky Almost Brought ‘Logan’ to Life
Director Darren Aronofsky was slated to helm Hugh Jackman in 2013’s The Wolverine, a big-budget adaptation of the X-Men. Even though he “loved the script”, what made him give up on the movie? The director, 55, discussed his reasons for leaving in detail in an MTV News podcast.
At the time, he was going through a divorce from actress Rachel Weisz, and filming The Wolverine would have meant the worst possible separation from their young son. Aronofsky:
“I loved the script and I thought the film came out great. I just had… it was a hard time in my life… It was complicated. I couldn’t leave New York for that long an amount of time. And, to be honest, the possibility of ‘Noah’ had started to emerge, and here was something I’d been thinking about for years. I was really excited by that.”
Apart from the previously mentioned reasons for leaving the movie, Aronofsky had never been all that fond of the comic book movie genre, declaring to The Reeler back in 2006 that
“I am not a superhero type of guy.”
But what if Aronofsky had remained on board? Would we have received the same nuanced and layered portrayal of Wolverine as we did in Logan? It is difficult to say for sure, but one thing is guaranteed: the film would have been a very different beast altogether.
How The Wolverine Flourished Under James Mangold’s Direction?
Christopher McQuarrie was hired in August 2009 to pen the screenplay for The Wolverine. He wrote the 2013 superhero movie as a standalone rather than a prequel to any of the X-Men films, and it makes absolutely no reference to mutants.
In 2012, he revealed to Screen Rant that although the story is still set in the X-Men universe, it draws heavily from Japanese and spaghetti Western cinema and has a much more grounded basis in reality:
“Well you know, it was an X-Men movie – it was a Marvel movie – but it existed very much in a real world. And more than anything, I love it for the very fact that – at least in the script I wrote – he was the only mutant in the movie… It was what you’d imagine the Wolverine universe to be under the control of somebody who wrote The Usual Suspects and The Way of the Gun and is a fan of Sergio Leone. It was Kurosawa’s Wolverine. There was a real romance to it, there was real humor to it, and a very straightforward sort of plain-faced brutality to it.”
Meanwhile, apart from Logan and the spectral Jean Grey, there are two other mutants in James Mangold’s adaptation of The Wolverine: Yukio, and Viper. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Hugh Jackman discussed Wolverine’s cinematic future in the MCU and disclosed that a new actor will ultimately play the character:
“Totally. Honestly, Marlow, if seven years ago that had happened I’d be like, “Oh yeah!” but I knew it was the right time for me to leave the party—not just for me, but for the character.
Had Fox gone with Darren Aronofsky’s vision for ‘Logan’, we might have ended up with ‘Kurosawa’s Wolverine’. While his take on the character would have undoubtedly been interesting, it’s hard to imagine anyone else but Mangold adding such complexity and humanity to Wolverine’s chapter.
Stream The Wolverine on Disney Plus.
