11 Years Later, A Comics Plot Might Justify Hugh Jackman's Return In The MCU's X-Men
Old Man Logan indeed.
The X-Men and the trope of time travel are old friends. In fact, the idea of playing around with time to unexpected consequences has become such a reliable antic in the pages of X-Men that several members of the team and core allies are characters who have been displaced from potential futures, including Bishop and Cable.
X-Men lore is filled with countless alternate futures, numerous potentialities of how the story of mutantkind could turn out (usually for the worse). One of the most popular and iconic is Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan, a 2008-2009 storyline that saw Marvel’s favorite bad boy Wolverine turned into an aging relic who agrees to one last mission with a blind Hawkeye, traversing a twisted vision of the United States of America divided up into territories by supervillains. The original story arc served as the very loose basis for 2017’s Logan, but the continued adventures of that version of the character in the comics might end up providing justification for the MCU to keep the sole cinematic interpretation of the character along for a while. And now, that twisty storyline might be the basis for keeping Hugh Jackman in the MCU, even as a massive X-Men reset button is about to be pressed.
The official cast of the MCU’s X-Men.
The X-Men Are Coming...But What About Wolverine?
At this year’s D23 fan event over the weekend, Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios followed up on Jean Grey’s debut in the recent Spider-Man: Brand New Day by revealing several other cast members appearing in the MCU’s upcoming X-Men reboot. As of right now, the ensemble consists of Christopher Abbott as Professor Charles Xavier, Kit Connors as Scott Summers, Inde Navarrette as Rogue, Maya Boyd as Storm, with Samara Weaving and Adam Driver playing the villainous Emma Frost and Mister Sinister, respectively. As exciting as the reveal is, there are some glaring members of the team missing, and one of the most interesting is the omission of a certain adamantium-coated Canadian.
It’s not really unexpected, as Wolverine wasn’t a member of Xavier’s first class and didn’t become a member of the team until 1975 (only a year after his initial appearance in the pages of The Incredible Hulk). But there have been rumblings for years that the MCU was planning on introducing their own version of the mutant team; since the success of 2024’s Deadpool and Wolverine, it seems like the possibility of Hugh Jackman sticking around as Logan is stronger than ever (only reinforced by his confirmed appearance in Avengers: Doomsday later this year). While everything currently points to a franchise-wide soft reboot after 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, Marvel Studios just might decide to keep Hugh Jackman’s version of the character around, and there’s certainly a comic book precedent for it.
Already loosely adapted for the 2019 Fox film Logan, the Old Man Logan character could also be the perfect blueprint if the MCU wanted to keep Hugh Jackman in the role.
Old Man Logan’s Comics Saga Could Justify Bringing Back Hugh Jackman
While Mark Millar’s original Old Man Logan storyline ended with Wolverine deciding to liberate the United States from its supervillain overlords with a young son of Bruce Banner in tow, the aftermath of the 2015 Marvel Comics event Secret Wars transported him temporarily to the mainline Earth-616 universe. At the time, 616’s Wolverine was believed to be dead (immolated by molten adamantium), and upon realizing he was in the past of another universe, Old Man Logan set about ensuring that the events of his world couldn’t take place in the 616 timeline. Not only does he meet the 616 X-Men and play a role in multiple comics events of the time like Civil War 2 and Inhumans vs X-Men, but he also tracks down and defeats Mysterio (the villain responsible for tricking him into murdering his teammates in the original OML storyline) as well as several other villains who rise to power in his timeline, finally dying and being buried in his original future after defeating Sabretooth and Mister Sinister in the past.
As per the logic of Deadpool and Wolverine, the version of Logan currently hanging out with Wade and the rest of the Fox X-Men isn’t actually their original Wolverine – that one died during the events of Logan, leaving Deadpool stuck with a version of Wolverine from another universe in which the X-Men were murdered by anti-mutant attackers, which already makes him a stowaway from another reality. If Feige and co. were truly inclined to keep Jackman’s Wolverine around, it would be an incredibly easy (and historically supported) choice to fold him into the MCU after the universe is streamlined by the events of Avengers: Secret Wars, with him serving as a mentor of sorts to a younger generation of X-Men while also trying to prevent the events of his timeline from happening there.
There’s every possibility that the MCU could recast Wolverine further down the line for the sake of having their own take on the character, but stranger things have happened – and having a time-displaced Logan watching over younger versions of his found family would be a unique way to differentiate the MCU’s X-Men reboot from previous adaptations while also tipping the hat to the role of time-travel and alternate futures in the X-Men canon.
