Hugh Jackman finally said goodbye to Wolverine this year with “Logan,” which is trying to earn some Oscar love (more on that in a second), and for now the character is in the movie vault. But in today’s climate, no character is truly gone, and if you look over at Warner Bros., they’re more than happy to have two actors play the same role in different projects (a situation that has left Jared Leto not too pleased about someone else playing Joker in a developing spinoff). So it’s inevitable that some point, another actor will get the claws out, but for now, Fox is being cagey about the matter.
Stacey Snider, the chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox, was asked directly by Variety about whether or not the studio will suit up a new Wolverine, and all she would offer for now is, “Anything’s possible.”
Nobody is ruling anything out, and the simple reason is that Wolverine is a hugely popular character, a well known brand, and it’s a property they’d be foolish not to get back into the cinematic rotation.
READ MORE: ‘Logan’ Is The First Academy Screener In The Mail As The Oscar Race Turns The Corner
That said, their focus likely remains on “Logan,” and seeing what they can do with it in the awards season, and Snider believes its worthy of the highest accolades. “The way it combines classic storytelling with superhero lore is brilliant,” she said, praising the picture.
Look at the landscape as a whole, it would seem we’ve hit Peak Superhero, and for the past couple of years, various pundits have said that fatigue for the genre has settled in, or will soon. Well, this year’s smash success of “Wonder Woman,” “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2,” and “Spider-Man 2” begs to differ, and Snider isn’t worried about it either, because it’s all about finding the right way to do them.
“If we’re going to make a superhero movie, we have to ask ourselves: What’s our version? What’s a Fox Marvel film? When you look at films like ‘Deadpool‘ or ‘Logan’ or the upcoming ‘New Mutants,’ you’ll see they have their own personality. Great effort has been put into making sure they’re differentiated. ‘New Mutants’ is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It’s like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they’re dangerous,” she explained. “The only solution is to put them in a ‘Breakfast Club‘ detention/’Cuckoo’s Nest‘ institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it’s strange and combustible inside. The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven’t seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like ‘The Shining’ than ‘we’re teenagers let’s save the world.’ ”
It sounds like Fox is willing to expand the boundaries of what superhero movies can do, and given how well they’ve done with “Deadpool” and “Logan,” who can blame them?