Even before the arrival of Logan‘s final two trailers, James Mangold’s dystopian tentpole had built up a tremendous amount of goodwill. There’s the emphasis on character drama over spectacle, for one, not to mention the fact that Hugh Jackman reportedly took a pay cut to ensure his imminent action vehicle landed an R rating. All of this has lead to a film that won’t pander to a PG-13 audience, resulting in what is arguably the most exciting portrayal of Wolverine to date. How very fitting that it also happens to be the character’s swan song.
And so, after outlining the context of the film’s near-future setting, director James Mangold spoke to Cinema Blend about the absence of Mister Sinister – a character he considers to be too fantastical for the bleak, apocalyptic world of Logan.
“Now that you’ve seen some of the movie, I think [what] you get a better sense of is, that’s exactly the kind of thing this movie avoids. Meaning, the kind of operatic highly-costumed, stroboscopic villainy… that’s not in this movie. Everything is kind of as real as we can make it. The movie is trying to kind of take a step backward from that kind of spectacle, so that we get another kind of gain, you know. There’s that loss, but the gain is that the movie feels extremely real and is — as one person who saw the film said to me, ‘I feel like I could go down the street and run into that Wolverine.’ Meaning that this is in my world, not some shiny other world. This is actually taking place in my world.”
Mister Sinister will remain on the sidelines, then, but Wolverine will still have Richard E. Grant’s Dr. Zander Rice to contend with in two months’ time. When quizzed about the creative challenges of Logan in a separate interview with Fandango, Mangold pointed to the barnstorming success of Deadpool at 20th Century Fox, and how the Merc With a Mouth essentially changed the studio’s tune.
“I was already writing this movie before Deadpool came out but I will say that what Deadpool did is it made the studio feel a lot better about taking the risk I was asking them to take. They saw there was a marketplace reward for being different.”
Considering Tim Miller’s R-rated romp broke records left, right, and center in its journey to near $800 million worldwide, news that Fox is more welcoming of adult-oriented superhero movies isn’t all that surprising. Expect Logan to claw its way into theaters on March 3rd.
