Why won’t Marvel let Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine retire in peace?
The actor himself has promised to accept all future cameos as the beloved claw-gremlin, but this will only wear out his superpowersThere was once a time when Hugh Jackman Wolverine...
By Ben Child · The Guardian Culture
The actor himself has promised to accept all future cameos as the beloved claw-gremlin, but this will only wear out his superpowers There was once a time when Hugh Jackman Wolverine cameos made a sort of sense. Bursting out of a cell in full Weapon X gear, massacring half a bunker, then vanishing, in 2016’s otherwise pretty forgettable X-Men: Apocalypse . Telling potential recruitment team Magneto and Professor X to, er, go fuck themselves while propping up a bar in 2011’s X-Men: First Class . Even popping up via archived footage from X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2018’s Deadpool 2 . These were cameos we could accept: quick, self-contained sideshows that understood the sacred rule that such things ought to be fun and brief. They also arrived at a time when Jackman didn’t yet carry the weight of 25 years of audience investment. Last week, in an appearance on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show , Jackman revealed that he has banned himself from saying no to future appearances as the surly mutant. “I am never saying ‘never’ ever again,” he said. “But I did mean it when I said ‘never’, until the day when I changed my mind. But I really did for quite a few years, I meant it.” There are suggestions that he could make a brief appearance in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday, in order to capitalise on the success of Marvel’s recent $1bn megahit Deadpool & Wolverine, even though he wasn’t mentioned in an interminable name-on-chair live stream from earlier this year , in which most of the main cast members were revealed. Continue reading...