How much Hugh Jackman can you take? How about all the Hugh Jackman? The star will be seen in this summer's X-Men: Days Of Future Past and will also pop up in a future Wolverine slated for 2017. He's gone on record saying that might be his final performance as the bladed hero, and no doubt Fox noticed. However, is it possible that Fox will attempt to squeeze all the juice from the Hugh Jackman lemon by having him appear in 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse as well?
Collider flat-out asked Jackman about popping up in X-Men: Apocalypse in a question regarding the strenuous health and diet plan he needs to undergo to portray Marvel Comics' favorite Canuck. His answer was weirdly candid.
"No, in a weird way that has crossed my mind if that’s the way things play out, because physically, even though I was complaining about it because I found out about [X-Men: Days of Future Past] a month before I finished The Wolverine, so I was already planning on my cheat meals. It’s much easier because it’s tough to get there, physically, but once you’re there, it’s easier to maintain it."
Okay, Jackman might just be talking about fitness overall. But where there's smoke, there's fire. In an interview with X-Men producers Lauren Shuler-Donner and Hutch Parker, she seems to confirm this:
"INTERVIEWER: It seemed what [Jackman] was saying to me was that in an ideal world, X-Men: Apocalypse and another Wolverine solo movie would be, in an ideal world, filmed very close together to keep his physique. So are you guys planning to film them that way?LAUREN SHULER DONNER: We’re tryingHUTCHER PARKER: We are.DONNER: We’re absolutely trying, yes.
X-Men: Apocalypse would primarily focus on the First Class gang and be set in the 80's. That's the most basic story arc we've been hearing the whole time. But it would also be a fairly epic film, and you can't do epic without Wolverine, can you? It seems like Apocalypse would be prepping the world for an X-film without Wolverine (the character has appeared in seven X-movies thus far), but we might not be done with Jackman yet. If inspiration is found in the comics' Age of Apocalypse storyline, is it possible we're getting the badass one-handed alternate-reality Wolverine?
No doubt we'll be hearing whispers and rumors and finally, confirmations for months or even years. In the meantime, however, we definitely have a new X-Men coming up that's already been finished, and the marketing materials are coming fast and furious for X-Men: Days Of Future Past. You can check out the latest little teaser below...
Meanwhile, Jennifer Lawrence returns as Mystique in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, and as earlier trailers have implied, she's got a major role. Which is one of the reasons we have this new featurette about Mystique's position in the film as a major catalyst for all the X-action. In the comics, Mystique was the mastermind behind the new Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants who assassinated Senator Robert Kelly and began the Days Of Future Past storyline. Given that Mystique is more ambiguous than evil in these films (and that Kelly died in the first X-Men), expect things to be a little different.
