'The Wolverine' Won't Be a Prequel (and Wolverine Has Bone Claws)

The X-Men franchise has a muddled timeline. After X-Men, X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand went in chronological order, the movies started skipping around. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a prequel but never felt like it was dated correctly if it was supposed to come before X-Men. X-Men: First Class was also a prequel, but it's timeline is due for a possible mucking with X-Men: Days of Future Past, its upcoming sequel.

When Fox announced that The Wolverine would focus on Wolverine's days in Japan, everyone assumed that the movie would follow the iconic comic by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, which focused on Wolverine's story before he joined the X-Men. In an interview with Empire, though, The Wolverine director James Mangold revealed that his movie will actually take place long after the original X-Men trilogy wrapped up.

"Where this film sits in the universe of the films is after them all," reveals Mangold. "Jean Grey is gone, most of the X-Men are disbanded or gone, so there’s a tremendous sense of isolation for him."

At least someone's paying attention to the timeline in the X-Men franchise. There were many maddening issues with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and the blatant carelessness about that movie's place in the franchise was one of them. Good work, Mangold.

"That’s something that for me was very important, that I land in a very specific place in his timeline," says Mangold. "I wanted to be able to tell the story without the burden of handing it off to a film that already exists and having to conform to it. The ideas of immortality reign very heavily in this story and the burden of immortality weighs heavily on Logan. For me that’s such an interesting part of Logan’s character that is nearly impossible to explore if you have a kind of league or team movie."

What makes this even more interesting is that Empire debuted a new photo from The Wolverine showing Hugh Jackman as Wolverine with bone claws ...

If you know your X-Men history, Wolverine would probably have bone claws for one of two reasons. The first would be that the story takes place before he had adamantium fused to his bones. With some shots from The Wolverine appearing to take place in World War II prison camps, this could be the case.

There was also a period in the comics where Wolverine had bone claws after Magneto stripped the adamantium from his body. Odds are we're dealing with the first scenario here. We'll see Wolverine in flashbacks that take place back in history with the majority of the film taking place in whatever counts for present day in the X-Men franchise.