James Mangold has finally revealed when Logan is set as part of the wider X-Men universe.
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Talking to ComicBook.com, the director confirmed that the third solo Wolverine outing - and Hugh Jackman's last - is set in 2029 in order to make it as separate from the X-Men outings as possible.
"There's an epilogue scene in Days of Future Past which is 2024, or 2023, something like that. I just wanted to get far enough past. My goal was real simple: it was to pick a time where I had enough elbow room that I was clear of existing entanglements," he explained.
"Part of the way I think these films stop being fresh is when you find yourself making essentially a television series with $200 million episodes where you're literally just picking up where the last one left off and you're making a mini-series.
"Then it's impossible to do something fresh, meaning essentially you're just a director on the 14th episode of a television show picking up where the last one left off."
In case you need a refresher, Days of Future Past's final scene saw Wolverine return to his future self after successfully changing events in the past to make sure The Last Stand never existed.
We're kidding. (Kind of.)
The events of Days of Future Past effectively gave the X-Men universe a clean slate to continue to do the likes of Apocalypse without worrying about timey-wimey worries, and gave Mangold scope to do just about anything with Logan.
We'll have to wait and see if that means he's going to do something huge, but for now, he explained that he's just concerned with delivering something we haven't seen in a comic book movie before.
"The goal here was to somehow make a film that's different: to be a filmmaker myself and go, 'How would I bring myself to this? What would I do if I was starting from scratch?'," Mangold noted.
Logan's second trailer was unleashed yesterday and delivered gore sprinkled with a few F-bombs, and Mangold was kind enough to give us an exclusive breakdown of it.
We'll have to wait until March 1 in the UK and March 3 in the US to see the rest of Logan.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
