Full spoilers follow for Logan.
You loved Laura, a.k.a. X-23, in Logan, eh? After all, who didn’t adore the character played by Dafne Keen in the final Hugh Jackman Wolverine film?
Well, it sounds like we just might be getting more of Keen as the Logan clone in a future movie. Despite the seeming conclusive end of Logan, there have been increasing whispers from the filmmakers involved -- namely director James Mangold and producer Hutch Parker -- that Laura may yet return. During a recent Logan Noir Q&A, Mangold was asked about this very topic. He said, "Anything's possible. I've certainly talked to [the studio] about it. I even talked to them about it before we made the movie. I thought she was just such a great character, but with what Dafne did, I think that certainly that's possible."
I chatted with Parker recently about the future of the X-Men franchise, including Dark Phoenix and a world without Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and during that discussion the topic of an X-23 movie also came up. Read on for that and more from Parker…
IGN: There’s been chatter about Dafne Keen returning in some capacity as X-23 and Mangold hasn’t ruled it out. But do you think that bringing her back could in some way diminish the effect of Logan as a film? Because Logan has such a sort of finality to it.
Hutch Parker: I don't. I don't think so, because it goes back to the same bottom line which is -- and this is where Jim is sort of a brilliant custodian of these characters and a brilliant storyteller -- the impetus for him to make a movie is that he really feel passionately and strongly that he has a story that's worth telling. And you know he's as far from a cynical filmmaker as you can get. He's as passionate and as committed and as invested as you can imagine, and as a result it's its own guarantor if you will as to what an X-23 movie or a Laura movie would be. It's another way of saying he wouldn't do it just to do it. He will only do it if he finds a story that he thinks is worthy of standing on its own and where the X-23 character and the story being told is one that will compel and excite audiences, not in the same way as Logan because I think it will be different, but that will be successful in its own right, by its own measure, by the assessment of its own qualities and for the audience to embrace as something unique and sort of contained to itself. So I do think there is room for that, but it is incumbent on us to make sure that we find a story that really meets that criteria.
IGN: So you don't see it as being the kind of thing where she suddenly shows up in The New Mutants or something? You see it as more of a continuation of the Mangold version of the character?
HP: Yeah, I mean, look -- I don't know definitively, but in terms of the stuff we've been talking about, it's not sort of slipping her into the background of another movie. It's looking at that character, which is a great character and has a pretty interesting run within the comics, to find a story that we think she could carry or certainly be kind of majorly significant within. That's the only kind of thing that Jim as a storyteller, a filmmaker… that's the way his sort of process works. And the way his mind works in terms of what he would aspire to. Which isn’t to say that the studio couldn’t have a conversation about something else, but the one that we've been kind of discussing loosely and kicking around is more likely to be its own film.
IGN: Deadpool wound up being a huge success while you were still making Logan, so did that make it easier for you guys to go fully R-rated?
HP: In many ways, it would probably be a more interesting story if I told you yes, because it would imply challenges which are always more interesting than successes. But the truth is we had a tremendous amount of support from Fox about Logan from the very beginning. And you know it was Jim's desire kind of from the outset that it be R, and not for any arbitrary reason or because he had any obsession with making an R-rated movie, but because the story he was interested in telling was best told with the flexibility an R gave us -- that you were telling a story that required consequence, that you felt the results and the potential dangers of the world in which Logan and Laura and Charles find themselves in, and that you were achieving the appropriate emotional impact and achieving the appropriate sort of either tragedy or victory, depending on how you see some of these moments. That was dependent on being able to put the audience in this state of mind. And so pretty much from the beginning that was the intention and Fox was supportive of it, and I think we've been really lucky because Fox has realized that. It goes back a ways obviously, because you know it was something we were talking about coming off of The Wolverine, the previous film in Japan.
It's indicative of the movement Fox has made towards bold filmmakers and bold storytelling, both within the genre, but I feel pretty strongly looking at the slate kind of outside of the genre too. And so it really is part of their philosophical and strategic mandate. And I think that's probably what made both Deadpool and Logan easier experiences than they could have been. You have a company that had decided, we're going to bank on boldness and filmmakers, on originality, and that that seems like a better strategy for a more challenging marketplace than doing what's been done before. And I believe they’re right, and right as evidenced by The Martian, right as evidenced by Hidden Figures, right as evidenced by any number of films they've done over the last four or five years. So you know, that helps too. When a studio is having success with a certain methodology, they can lean into that more successfully and I definitely think that's been my experience these last four or five years at Fox.
IGN: This is kind of a nerdy question I guess, but the thing about Logan too is that you guys even went so far as to kill all the X-Men. James Mangold recently told me that in an earlier version of the script the film actually opened with a scene showing their deaths. Can you speak a bit about that and the decision to ultimately not depict that scene?
HP: Yes, it was going to depict certain characters. And yet we realized as we were kind of conceiving the movie and the approach that as much as that felt like an important incident, the deeper we got into the telling of the Logan story the more we realized it was sort of background. It was actually a background context for why they’re living the way they're living and didn't feel like it warranted depiction. We wanted to stay closer to Logan and keep it to being a much more intimate and directly connected story rather than reaching outside of the time in which the movie takes place to do a flashback or that sort of a conceit. So it really grew more out of just a decision that Jim was making on how best to tell this story than anything else, and I think in hindsight it was the right decision. And if you listen to the newscast that describes that [in the movie], it actually says some of the X-Men were killed. It doesn't kill all of them. So we left ourselves a little wiggle room!
Logan is out now On Demand and on Blu-ray. Be sure to read the first part of my chat with Hutch Parker, where we discuss Dark Phoenix, a post-Hugh Jackman X-Men world, and more.
Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura.
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