While it may not be the Wolverine film we were hoping for, The Wolverine definitely improved on Origins, most helpfully by limiting the number of mutants crammed onto the screen. But as Mark Bomback, one of the writers who worked on the latest Logan outing, explains to Creative Screenwriting, he did have an idea to try to get Anna Paquin’s troubled Rogue into the film as well, before abandoning the concept while still in an early draft stage.
“I love Rogue and I just think that there’s something about this idea that Rogue is tremendously empathetic but incapable of safe human contact. That always moved me and I thought that’s what really got to the heart of what makes the** X-Men** franchise so unique,” he says. “So I was trying to do something with Rogue in the script. I even had a set of ideas that the old man possessed a version of Rogue’s power and that was going to be indicated by a white stripe in his hair.
“Eventually it became very goofy, and I threw it out because I started realising throughout the script that it became more problematic than cool. It’s no accident to me that in the first X-Men film the first two mutants that you really see who have a connection are Wolverine and Rogue. There’s something special between them, so I was trying to bring Rogue into it, but it just didn’t get there. I regretted there wasn’t a way to figure it out, but when I look at the film now, it would have stuck out if we tried to shoehorn her in there just because it was another character from the universe.”
It might well have been a little too much to try to get her in there, but Rogue fans need not worry – she’ll be a small part of X-Men: Days Of Future Past, which is about to finish shooting and will hit our screens on May 22 next year. As for The Wolverine, you can hear star Hugh Jackman and director James Mangold talk about the movie on the Empire Podcast below. And why not check out our feature on the evolution of the main man?