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X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE
Starring Hugh Jackman (Logan / James Howlett / Wolverine), Liev Schreiber (Victor Creed), Ryan Reynolds (Wade Wilson), Lynn Collins (Kayla), Taylor Kitsch (Remy LeBeau / Gambit), and Danny Huston (William Stryker) with Tim Pocock as Scott Sommers / Cyclops, and a special appearance by Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier / Professor X
Directed by Gavin Hood
Produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, Ralph Winter, Joe Palermo, and Hugh Jackman
Written by David Benioff and Skip Woods
Music By Harry Gregson-Williams
Distributed by 20th Century Fox
Run Time: 1 hour and 47 minutes
World Premier: April 9, 2009, Sydney, Australia
Opening Weekend Box Office: $85 million
Worldwide Box Office: $373 million
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 38%
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Fun X-Men Origins: Wolverine Facts
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the first Marvel film produced by 20th Century Fox without any sort of working relationship with Kevin Feige and the Marvel Studios team, as Marvel Studios had decided prior to the release of 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand to begin making their own self-financed films; movies which would comprise Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel Studios released their first two independent films Iron Man (starring Robert Downey Jr) and The Incredible Hulk (starring Edward Norton) in 2008, with Iron Man out-grossing all three of Fox’s X-Men films that were released from 2000-2006.
Writer David Benioff drew inspiration from Marvel Comics stories such as 1982’s Wolverine solo series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, 1991’s Weapon X by Barry Windsor-Smith, and 2001’s Origin by Paul Jenkins with Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada in writing the script for X-Men: Origins: Wolverine. Benioff reportedly devised his script with an R-rating in mind, prompting Fox to hire Skip Woods to revise the script and tone down some of the darker themes and violence.
While X-Men Origins: Wolverine served as an origin story for the Logan / Wolverine character seen in the three previous X-Men films produced by Fox from 2000-2006, it also served as the live action introduction to popular Marvel characters such as Gambit and Deadpool.
The introduction of Wade Wilson / Deadpool / Weapon XI in X-Men Origins Wolverine was highly criticized. The casting of actor Ryan Reynolds for the role was actually met with widespread acclaim, as he had been a longstanding fan choice for the role, much like Patrick Stewart had once upon a time been universally fan cast as Professor X. In fact, in 2004’s Cable and Deadpool # 2, the Deadpool character himself describes his physical appearance as âRyan Reynolds crossed with Shar-pei.â Prior to being cast, Reynolds had been hard at work trying to develop a film centered around Marvel’s Merc with a Mouth, and he therefore accepted the part in Origins with a great deal of enthusiasm. The end result however, ended up leaving much left to be desired. Bringing Deadpool to life in a more faithful and satisfactory way became an obsession for Reynolds following Origins, and his endless campaigning would eventually lead to a Deadpool film being produced by Fox and released in 2016. Due to the complicated nature of Deadpool as a character as well as the X-Men movie timeline itself, I’ll refrain from getting too much into Deadpool’s journey beyond Origins here and save it for my review of the Deadpool film.
Actor / Martial artist Scott Adkins actually portrayed Weapon XI (the character that Wade Wilson became) in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
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Though both Bryan Singer (director of X-Men and X-2: X-Men United) and Brett Ratner (director of X-Men: The Last Stand) expressed interest in returning to the X-Men franchise to helm this project, Fox ultimately went with Gavin Hood, hiring him in the Summer of 2007. Hood has been credited with the idea of making Wolverine and Sabretooth half-brothers.
In 2007, James Vanderbilt and Scott Silver were hired by Fox to revise the script for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but before they formally got to work on the project, the Writers Guild of America Strike occurred. The Strike involved all 12,000 film and television screenwriters of the two American Labor Unions (WGAE and WGAW). X-Men Origins: Wolverine began filming during the strike, which lingered throughout most of its initial round of physical production. During the filming of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, there was a tremendous amount of tension between Director Gavin Hood and Fox executives over Hood’s vision for the film that he wanted to shoot. Hood was looking to put a great deal of emphasis on the idea of Logan being an Army veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and this was seen by executives as an unnecessarily heavy plot device that would alienate audiences. It reportedly took an on-set visit by Kevin Feige’s mentor Richard Donner himself (the iconic director of 1978’s Superman: The Movie) to smooth things over, and while Logan’s military past certainly drives the overall plot of the film, the P.T.S.D. aspect was significantly diminished.
Additional filming on X-Men: Origins Wolverine took place in early-2009, most of which reportedly revolved around actor Ryan Reynolds.
On March 31, 2009, a full-length DVD-quality workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked online. The FBI and MPAA both carried out investigations into the incident. The workprint was illegally downloaded a purported 4.5 million times between the time of the leak and the release of the movie in theaters. Fox would later suggest that up to 15 million people had illegally downloaded the workprint, which presumably cost the company millions of dollars at the worldwide box office.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine failed to land amongst the Top-10 highest-grossing films of 2009, something all three of its predecessors managed to do (X-Men at # 9 in 2000, X-2: X-Men United at # 9 in 2003, and X-Men: The Last Stand at # 7 in 2006). While Origins ($373 million) stood as the second least-grossing X-Men film released by Fox at the time (behind X2 and The Last Stand but ahead of X-Men), it did manage to outperform Marvel Studios’ The Incredible Hulk ($ 264 million) at the box office.
Beyond X-Men Origins: Wolverine a decision was made to reboot the X-Men franchise with 2011’s X-Men: First Class. 2013 saw the release of The Wolverine (a sequel of sorts to X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and then in 2014, the past and present X-Men Cinematic mythologies collied in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Ensuing X-Men films by Fox included 2016’s Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse, and 2017’s Logan (the third film in the Wolverine Trilogy).
On December 17, 2017, the Walt Disney Company announced that an agreement had been reached with 20th Century Fox that would see Disney acquire Fox’s television and film divisions, among other things. Disney had acquired Marvel Entertainment at the end of 2009, and Marvel Studios with it. The lucrative Fox deal therefore landed the film rights to Marvel’s mutants under the Disney / Marvel Studios umbrella. Fox shareholders unanimously approved the transaction on July 27, 2018, and the deal was finalized on March 20, 2019. In the meantime, Deadpool 2 was released theatrically in 2018, followed by Dark Phoenix in 2019, and New Mutants in 2020. New Mutants marked the thirteenth X-Men film and the last X-Men project produced by the previous regime at Fox.
2022’s Marvel Studios film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness saw Marvel Studios cast actor Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier / Professor X 12-years removed from the first X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Stewart had portrayed Xavier in X-Men, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Logan. The version of the Xavier character that Stewart portrayed in Multiverse of Madness however, has been described as a Multiversal Variant (from Earth-838) of the Xavier seen in the previous X-Men films. Even though this version of Xavier was not from the 616-Universe, the inclusion of Xavier in the Doctor Strange sequel was historically significant, as it marked the first appearance of a mutant character within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Furthermore, the Xavier from Earth-838 was not only the leader of The X-Men, but also a member of the esteemed Illuminati which consisted of Mister Fantastic (Reed Richards), Captain Carter (Peggy Carter), Black Bolt, Captain Marvel (Maria Rambeau), and Karl Mordo (who replaced Earth-838’s Doctor Strange), and the film treated longtime Marvel movie fans with a unique opportunity to see Xavier share the screen with MCU veterans such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Hayley Atwell, and Elizabeth Olsen.
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My X-Men Origins: Wolverine Review
So, I don’t HATE X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I feel like I should establish that right out the gate here, because I know that a lot of people DO hate this movie. To each their own and all of that, and I know as a self-professed massive Deadpool fan, I probably SHOULD hate this movie, but I also happen to be a pretty big Wolverine fan, and I am specifically a huge fan of Hugh Jackman’s take on the character, so Origins isn’t just about Deadpool, it’s about Wolverine, and as a Wolverine story, there are a lot of things that I appreciate about Origins.
Right off the top, I really liked how faithful the film was to the Wolverine: Origin series. You see, Wolverine was first introduced in 1975 (created by Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and John Romita Sr) and as the character was developed and caught on with fans, one of the things that made him so intriguing was the mystery that surrounded his past. Wolverine was not introduced with a traditional origin story, he was just dropped into a fight against The Hulk and was then grouped together with a new team of X-Men that included Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Thunderbird along with original team member Cyclops. Wolverine was short, moody, and vicious; a mutant that boasted a healing factor that made him virtually indestructible and three razor-sharp Adamantium claws that extended from each of his hands which made him extremely dangerous. As time evolved, hints (some small and some big) were dropped that offered glimpses into Wolverine’s past, most notably his time in the Weapon X program and the torturous bonding of his skeleton with Adamantium, as told in graphic and brilliant fashion in Barry Windsor Smith’s Weapon X arc which revealed that Wolverine was created to be the ultimate killing machine. Slowly but surely, readers were able to piece together why Logan was the way that he was, and this could only be done by piecing it together as if it were a puzzle, for that was what Marvel intended it to be.
Finally, in 2001, the powers-that-be at Marvel decided to at long last tell Logan’s story and that was contained in the Wolverine: Origin miniseries. That story revealed that Wolverine was over 100-years old and that he’d had his claws long before his Weapon X days (bone claws, a physical manifestation of his mutation). It also revealed that the sickly young Logan had been raised in a wealthy home and that the loving and caring man that he knew as his father (John Howlett) was in fact not his biological father. Instead, Logan (James Howlett) was the bastard son of the poor, drunken, and very abusive groundskeeper Thomas Logan, who had an affair with John’s wife Elizabeth, through which James was created. Thomas Logan also had a cruel and animalistic son that went by âDogâ, who delighted in bullying the sickly young James as they grew up. All of this came to a head when Thomas made a play for Elizabeth and killed John, leading to young James killing Thomas following the manifestation of his claws. Thomas learned his true heritage as Logan’s son (hence the ‘Loganâ name) and consequently Dog’s half-brother. He was outcast by his mother and set out on a path from there that would see him evolve into who he became. I enjoyed Wolverine: Origin as both a reader and a Wolverine fan, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine adapted a lot of the elements of that story quite well. Yes, they changed âDogâ into Victor Creed, but when I was first reading Origin, I privately wondered if Dog would eventually be revealed to have been Victor anyway, so I didn’t mind the change and I thought it did wonders for the relationship between Wolverine and Sabretooth and greatly benefited the story that was told from there in the film.
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I also really enjoyed the flashback sequences showing Logan and Victor fighting in (and surviving through) various wars, culminating in their mutual recruitment by William Stryker for Team X during the Vietnam War era. The filmmakers did a great job showing Logan’s nobility and Victor’s growing instability over time and needed only a short amount of time doing it, and then, the Team X stuff was a lot of fun, overall.
Logan and Victor align with fellow mutants John Wraith, Fred Dukes, Agent Zero, Chris Bradley, and the mouthy Wade Wilson. The assembling of this team shows Stryker’s obsession with mutants and their abilities at a stage during which he’d yet to grow to hate them as he eventually would. Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson is the highlight of every scene with Team X here as we see Logan and Victor become at odds over Victor’s willingness to do (and delight in) whatever Stryker requested, no matter how immoral. At its core, Team X was bad men doing bad things, and we also get to see Stryker’s obsession with Adamantium in its infancy during these scenes. Good stuff.
From there, we jump ahead several years and catch up with Logan after he left Team X and parted ways with Victor. Logan is now working in Canada as a logger, and he has fallen deeply in love with a young woman named Kayla. Logan has put the sins of his past behind him as best he can and wants only to live a simple and quiet life with the woman of his dreams, but of course, Stryker soon comes calling with trouble.
Stryker informs Logan that someone is killing the now former members of Team X and that Chris and Wade have already fallen victim to the sinister plot. Logan declines Stryker’s request for his assistance, insisting that he has moved on from those days, but he soon discovers that Kayla has been murdered, and this changes everything. Logan knows Victor to be the culprit and having lost the only thing that remotely mattered to him, combined with Stryker’s insistence that it was Victor that killed Chris and Wade, provokes Logan to agree to a sinister proposition from Stryker that will turn him into the ultimate killing machine, after which he can effectively kill Victor, who boasts a similar healing factor to Logan’s, by the way.
The dangerous and excruciating procedure will see Logan’s skeleton bonded with Adamantium (the strongest metal on this Earth), and I thought this too was handled very, very well. Could it have been more bloody and violent? Sure, and maybe that would have been awesome, but we still get to see Logan venture to Alkali Lake and enter that tub that he discovered in X2, and we get to watch Stryker oversee the procedure, complete with Stryker’s joy at realizing that he’d been right about Logan being able to survive the procedure, and complete with Stryker betraying Logan when he orders Logan’s memory be erased! This prompts Logan to leap from the tub in a sequence that is very much ripped out of the pages of the aforementioned Weapon X comic (albeit without the blood) and the newly born ultimate killing machine with the Adamantium coated claws vows to kill Stryker and flees into the wilderness. Weapon X (or âWeapon 10â, as he was Stryker’s tenth attempt at pulling off the procedure) has escaped!
Naked, afraid, confused, and angry, Logan is taken in by a kind elderly couple, and this of course costs them their lives in what was a sweet and tragic sequence that I rather enjoyed for what it was. Logan kills Zero (who Stryker sent to kill Logan) in an explosive sequence, then sets out to find the other surviving members of the team, with hopes that they can point him in Stryker’s direction. Logan reunites with Wraith and Dukes (now in his âBlobâ form). Dukes reveals that Victor still works for Stryker and that Victor hunts down mutants for Stryker to experiment upon at his âIsland.â Dukes furthermore reveals that a mutant named Remy LeBeau is the only known survivor / escapee of Stryker’s Island. This provokes Logan to track down and confront LeBeau (Gambit) and I thought this was yet another fun sequence. Gambit’s powers looked cool, and I liked Taylor Kitsch in the role, and he and Logan have a nice little fight due to the fact that Gambit wants no part in anything that has to do with Stryker’s Island. Victor soon arrives and kills Wraith, subsequently changing Gambit’s mind and LeBeau agrees to fly Logan to Stryker’s Island but insists his âhelpâ ends at the drop-off.
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Up to this point of the film guys, I honestly don’t have a lot of negative things to say about this movie! Sure, there could have been more blood and violence, and yes, the CGI is a bit choppy at times (the claws come to mind especially), but overall, this was a solid, intriguing, and quite faithfully adapted origin story for Wolverine as well as William Stryker; the primary antagonist of X2: X-Men United.
From here however, things get wonky.
Gambit flies Logan to Stryker’s Island and Logan has blood and vengeance in his sights until he locates Stryker and discovers that his beloved Kayla is still alive ⌠and she was a mutant all along; one that possess the power of suggestive influence ⌠and she faked her death because she was in cahoots with Stryker ⌠because she has a sister named Emma that shares a power set with Marvel character Emma Frost, but isn’t actually Emma Frost … and that she only worked with Stryker against Logan for Emma’s sake, and that she is sorry and never expected to legitimately fall in love with Logan, and ⌠yeah!
Logan quickly deduces that he must have only felt as passionately about Kayla as he did because she used her mutant powers to persuade him to feel that way, and dejected, he simply decides to walk away from the whole ordeal. Meanwhile, Stryker declares that he isn’t going to actually honor his promise to Kayla and even informs Victor that he isn’t going to honor his promise to him either (which was the coating of Victor’s skeleton with Adamantium). This provokes Victor into a rage, and he attacks Kayla, prompting Logan to begrudgingly return to rescue her. As Logan returns to fight Victor, Stryker activates âWeapon XI.â
Weapon XI is of course the 11th test subject of Stryker’s (whom he briefly refers to as âThe Dead Pool.â). His primary body is that of Wade Wilson’s, but his mouth has been purposefully sewn shut. He also been imbued with the powers of several mutants, including Wraith (teleportation) and a young Scott Sommers / Cyclops (optic blasts), and boasts the instinctive fighting skills and swordsmanship that Wade did (complete with retractable Adamantium swords). He also boasts Logan’s healing factor.
Logan joins Kayla in an attempt to free the many mutants that Stryker has imprisoned (including Emma and Cyclops) and fights Weapon XI and even receives an assist from Victor, ultimately beheading Weapon XI. In the meantime, Professor Xavier arrives to rescue the mutants and take them back to the X-Mansion. Kayla stays behind to assist Logan and is mortally wounded. Everything comes down to Stryker vs Logan and Stryker ends up shooting Logan in the head with an Adamantium bullet that Stryker believes will kill Weapon X. Before dying, Kayla uses her abilities to force Stryker into walking until his feet bleed. He complies, Kayla dies, and Logan regains consciousness just in time for Gambit to get him off Stryker’s Island, but it is revealed that the Adamantium bullet stripped Logan of his memories. He doesn’t recognize Kayla, doesn’t remember Stryker or Victor, and doesn’t even know who Gambit is. All he has are his Army dog tags which are inscribed with the word âWolverine.â
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There are additional scenes that were filmed where Logan is seen âdrinking to remember” and where the decapitated head of Weapon XI opens its eyes and mouth, but that’s the gist of this movie.
Why does it work for me? Well, because again, I think it’s a good origin for the Wolverine character that helped make Fox’s X-Men films from 2000-2006 so great, and I think it works quite nicely as a prequel to 2000’s X-Men. Even if you don’t like this particular movie, seeing it at least once does enrich the story that is told in X-Men as well as X2 (specifically everything with Stryker). It’s kind of neat knowing that Logan knows Victor in X-Men but doesn’t know that he knows him, and it’s cool knowing all of this backstory and then watching Logan step out of the shadows for that cage fight where he meets Rogue, and the trajectory of his journey is significantly changed. Even Cyclops has an idea of who Logan is in X-Men, but it’s up to you to decide whether or not that makes him more of a dick than Logan already thinks he is in that film. If you do, it just adds to the laundry list of ways that the filmmakers got Cyclops wrong.
Also, I really enjoyed the performances of the primary cast members in this film. First off, Hugh Jackman was gold! This may have been his best overall work as the Wolverine character up to the time of its release. I think a case could be made for X2 over this, but this was really, really good. We got to see him showcase genuine vulnerability in addition to rage. I loved his chemistry with Lynn Collins, and I adored them as a couple. Every scene that he had with Liev Schreiber and Danny Huston was great, and I loved both Schreiber as Sabretooth and Huston as Stryker. I also loved Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson. He reportedly improvised the few lines that he had in this film, but he was funny, charming, and charismatic, and he undeniably made a great Wade Wilson âŚ
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And that brings me to the negative, because as a Deadpool fan, yes, Deadpool IS a negative.
To take a character that is renowned for his quips, colorful language, and insults, and to have his mouth sewn shut was pure idiocy! You took the mouth away from Marvel’s Merc with a Mouth! It’s akin to taking away Superman’s cape or Wolverine’s claws! It was stupid, and to make matters worse, the powers-that-be were told that it was stupid! Director Gavin Hood himself was said to have hated the Weapon XI character and Ryan Reynolds reportedly warned against the extremely unfaithful adaptation. It wasn’t just the mouth either! They had Deadpool shooting lasers out of his eyes and naturally teleporting and wielding Adamantium swords ⌠it was lame, and it was one of the single greatest abominations in the history of films based on Marvel characters. They didn’t get anything right!
To save face, I guess the powers-that-be tried to stress that this was âWeapon XIâ; not âDeadpoolâ, but they cast Wade Wilson and they cast the guy that most everyone wanted to be Wade Wilson, and Stryker literally says the words âDead Poolâ and they show traces of the black around his eyes which are a callback to his trademark red-and-black mask … They knew what they were doing with the marketing, and it was a blatant slap in the face to fans of the Deadpool character. In fact, the only positive that came out of this abysmal adaptation was the casting of Ryan Reynolds and how the casting fanned the flames of his desire to get a Deadpool solo movie made, which he eventually did.Â
Aside from Deadpool, I also believe it is completely fair to bash the third act of this film in its entirety. We didn’t need all of the convoluted Kayla drama and it made very little sense for Logan and Victor to team-up either. Meanwhile, Gambit was left completely out of the final battle. I will say the Professor X cameo was a nice little touch, and the Adamantium bullet thing put a nice bow on the story as a prequel, but most of it was nonsense.
This is a movie that I would readily recommend to Wolverine fans and X-Men movie fans alike, for there is a lot to appreciate and take in, especially over the course of the first hour or so, but for Deadpool fans, I would not recommend this film at all. Being a mix of both, I mostly enjoyed it for what it was, but it absolutely could have been much, much more.
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Highlights of X-Men Origins: Wolverine:
Hugh Jackman is Wolverine
Liev Schreiber as Victor Creed / Sabretooth
Chemistry Between Hugh Jackman and Lynn Collins
Danny Huston as William Stryker
Taylor Kitsch as Gambit
Ryan Reynolds cast as Wade Wilson / Deadpool
Notable MCU Concepts and Characters Introduced:
X-Men Origins: Wolverine serves as a prequel to 2000’s X-Men, which serves as an origin story for a Universe of characters that are rumored to be set to be formally introduced in Marvel Studiosâ upcoming film Deadpool 3, including a purported Variant of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. X-Men Origins: Wolverine also serves however as a sort of origin story for Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson / Deadpool, the titular character of Deadpool 3, though whether or not the version of the character that we will see in Deadpool 3 is the exact version of the character that we see in in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a complicated matter. It’s best at this point to simply assume that the characters are loosely tied, due to the Deadpool character’s equally complicated self-awareness. Meanwhile, the MCUâs Earth-838 version of Charles Xavier / Professor X (seen in 2022âs Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) looks nearly identical to the Professor X seen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with both characters portrayed by actor Patrick Stewart.
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