Hugh Jackman's The Wolverine is not a prequel to the X-Men films

Kristy Sturdivant October 25th, 2012

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine

A bit of interesting news has popped up this morning as we’re learning that the upcoming X-Men film THE WOLVERINE, starring Hugh Jackman, will not be the prequel we all thought it would be. Turns out the film will be set after the three films in the Bryan Singer trilogy which is an interesting twist. If you are not fond of SPOILERS then don’t read any further.

In a recent interview, director James Mangold said, “Where this film sits in the universe of the films is after them all. Jean Grey is gone, most of the X-Men are disbanded or gone, so there’s a tremendous sense of isolation for him…That’s something that for me was very important, that I land in a very specific place in his timeline. I wanted to be able to tell the story without the burden of handing it off to a film that already exists and having to conform to it. The ideas of immortality reign very heavily in this story and the burden of immortality weighs heavily on Logan. For me that’s such an interesting part of Logan’s character that is nearly impossible to explore if you have a kind of league or team movie.” Interesting bit of information considering just days ago it was revealed that Jean Grey (played by Famke Janssen) was going to have a cameo in the film. Does this mean that cameo will be just a flashback, or has the Phoenix risen again? Maybe we’ll get some more information but I’m not going to get my hopes up.

Directed by James Mangold, THE WOLVERINE stars: Hugh Jackman, Brian Tee, Will Yun Lee, Hiroyuki Sanada, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Rila Fukushima and James Fraser. THE WOLVERINE is set to open in theaters on July 26th, 2013. (Empire via ComingSoon.net)