The success of this year’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past with critics and fans led to its follow-up getting the inevitable greenlight. With the shoot for the sequel, X-Men: Apocalypse, scheduled to commence early next year, the pieces are falling into place with regards to its story and cast. One star player in the franchise whose name hasn’t been thrown into that mix is Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman. Commanding a large chunk of screen time in DoFP, we’ve been led to believe his mutton-chopped mutant would take a backseat for the next chapter, a belief that may not be true.
The bulk of our knowledge on Apocalypse thus far indicates the return of the First Class cast along with younger versions of the ‘main’ X-Men gang re-cast with age-appropriate actors. Nevertheless, it seems that Jackman has been chatting to the folks at Fox and he’s gearing up for a return to the series. Speaking on the Happy Say Confused Podcast, the actor revealed his involvement in the mutant sequel:
“I have been speaking to the guys, and I’m not at liberty to tell exactly what’s going on, which is largely framing my answer here… But there’s still a lot unknown about that, actually. There are some very exciting things about integrating the whole X-Men world, including the Wolverine movie. There’s some really cool things going on.”
The Wolverine movie he’s referring to is the third Wolverine spin-off outing, that he’s “very, very excited” about. After the success of the second entry, simply titled The Wolverine, a threequel was announced that Jackman also said he and David James Kelly were “working on… really hard.” Whether or not he makes a full-blown appearance in Apocalypse, or merely pops in for another First Class-style cameo, he will definitely take centre stage once again in his next solo pic.
Still, the X-Men world he mentions is beginning to expand to Marvel-inspired levels of interconnection. In essence, this suggests the recently-announced Deadpool, Gambit and Mystique spin-off movies could all tie in – along with Wolvie 3 – to culminate in a gigantic event at some point down the line. With the success of DoFP, whatever Fox has up their sleeve, we’ll be excited to see how it rolls out.
Directed by Bryan Singer, X-Men: Apocalypse will hit cinemas on May 27, 2016, followed by The Wolverine 3 on March 3rd, 2017.
