It’s just about time for production to start rolling on Wolverine. It’s been in pre-production long enough to get a release date (May 1, 2009) and a major script rewrite. Instead of finding out what to expect from the movie as we wait for it to get moving, however, we keep finding out what not to expect.

For instance, last week we found out Lief Schreiber was in talks to play a younger version of Brian Cox’s X-Men United character, William Stryker. So Cox is out, Schreiber may be in. Such a shame. While I like Schreiber, Brian Cox was awesome in that role and could have been a fantastic villain for this spin-off picture.

Now we’re finding out Tyler Mane will not be reprising his role as Sabertooth from the first X-Men picture. That’s interesting since speculation has been heavy that the Wolverine film will follow the earlier years of the character and would probably feature a more faithful rendition of Sabertooth. It might happen, and hopefully it’ll be more ferocious than the passive sidekick we got in the first picture, but Filmonic reports that Mane announced on his MySpace page that he’s not going to be playing the character again.

I didn’t think Mane was at fault for the low-key version of the character we saw before, so I’m a little bummed if he’s being left out, assuming we will see the character in Wolverine. At the very least the pro-wrestler had the right look for Sabertooth. Still, there’s no assurance of what characters other than Wolverine himself will be putting in an appearance, so there’s no sense getting too depressed about Mane’s announcement.