Hugh Jackman can’t play Wolverine forever, as much as we would like him to. But today the actor posted an image on social media letting his fans know the end of the line for him as the iconic Marvel mutant is inevitably coming.
It’s hard to believe it’s been almost 15 years since the Aussie brought the superhero the big screen for the first time with his break out role in 2000’s X-Men and he’ll be 18 years in by the time the third solo Wolverine film hits the big screen on May 3, 2017. But no matter which way you look at it, it’s hard to picture another actor on the big screen with Wolverine’s claws.
Today Jackman took to his Instagram account and posted a picture of his hands with three of Wolverine’s six adamantium claws extended captioned with “WOLVERINE…ONE LAST TIME. HJ.”
The pic refers to the still-untitled and over two years from release Wolverine 3. The film will re-team Jackman with his The Wolverine director James Mangold in what now can be confirmed as his last hurrah in the role. Since Wolverine has appeared in every X-Men movie in the franchise, we should not count him out to show up in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse though. Mangold later responded to Jackman via his Twitter account.
“@RealHughJackman: WOLVERINE …ONE LAST TIME. HJ https://t.co/vlqMyFchGx” Can’t wait to make this, HJ! Been toiling quietly a while now!
— Mangold (@mang0ld) March 29, 2015
Most of the original characters that appeared in the first X-Men film have been re-cast with younger actors in the First Class-era prequel films. Add in the timeline reboot courtesy of Days of Future Past, it seems like only a matter of time before 20th Century Fox has to make the tough choice to either retire the character or re-cast the role.
Jackman told Collider in May that retiring or passing the torch will be no easy task.
Right now I don’t [want to let it go], and as long as it keeps going this direction I probably won’t (smiles). But I’ve made that promise to you, it’s not something I will stick around at and stay at if I feel it’s dropping off or if I don’t feel that urge to go and do it, because I know there’s 10 million actors out there who would kill themselves to play the part. They should, it’s a great part.
When you think about it, Apocalypse will be set in the ’80s, leaving the next film to likely move forward a decade later when it could nearly come full circle to the very first film. It would be certainly saying an awful lot if Jackman held onto the role long enough to actually repeat timeframes in the series. However with so little known about Wolverine 3 at this point, its hard to say exactly how (or even when) that film will fit into the grand X-scheme of things.
Though ponder these potential plot monkey wrenches for Apocalypse and Wolverine 3 courtesy of Sir Patrick Stewart:
Magneto, Ian McKellen, is certainly going to be in [X-Men: Apocalypse]. And what I’m very excited about is that we have been talking about a Wolverine movie, which would team Hugh Jackman and myself together. Wolverine and Professor Xavier. That would be a very different sort of X-Men from the four movies that I’ve already done.
The events of Days of Future Past technically throw the first two solo Wolverine films out the window, depending on the cards you’re playing with time travel theories. The third film is so far down the line it easliy has enough prep time to properly prepare to serve as the fitting swan song for Jackman’s truly amazing tenure in the role.
SOURCE: Hugh Jackman
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