James Mangold, director of Logan, is still interested in making a movie starring X-23. The codename of the semi-feral girl Laura who was introduced in the final Wolverine movie, X-23 was created from the DNA of Wolverine and has similar powers to him, possessing preternatural agility, a pair of retractable adamantium-coated claws on each hand, and the ability to swiftly heal from injury.
Laura/X-23 originated in 2003, in an eponymous third-season episode of X-Men: Evolution, an animated series that replaced the iconic ‘90s saga and recast many of its characters as teenagers. She debuted in comics in limited series NYX, which controversially cast her as an underage prostitute catering to sadomasochists, and eventually encountered the X-Men after inadvertently implicating Wolverine in the killing of some thugs who were harassing a girl for having a mutant boyfriend. Her retroactively applied comics origin runs parallel to that seen in Logan, portraying her as a creation of a secret scientific research program designed to replace the Weapon X project that created Wolverine, and trained to be an assassin before she eventually escaped, destroying the facility and its work behind her.
Mangold was interviewed by The Playlist at Mill Valley Film Festival, where Mangold was in attendance to promote Ford v Ferrari, a historical drama about the engineering war between the two manufacturers that culminated at Les Mans in 1966. As a quick final question he was asked if he was still interested in writing and directing an X-23 movie. His response was “Do I have an interest? Yes. Will it happen? At least in the near future, I doubt it.”
One obstacle that would have existed for any potential movie in the past is becoming less of an issue, that of the claim that audiences don’t want to see female-fronted superhero movies, erroneously justified for years largely due to the dual bombs of Catwoman and Elektra (and to a lesser extent, Aeon Flux). However, their failure was down to them simply being really bad films for reasons unconnected to their hero’s gender, and whose screenplays were so appalling that no amount of other talent could have saved them. The recent success of the likes of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, and TV series Supergirl and Jessica Jones, not to mention the upcoming solo Black Widow movie audiences have been clamoring for since she debuted in Iron Man 2, indicate that at least in this regard perception is shifting.
With the Disney/Fox merger, any planned X-Men movies became unlikely to go ahead in their current forms, and those that emerge in the future that aren’t Deadpool will be reboots. In spite of that, with Logan being generally accepted as one of the greatest superhero movies ever made, the chance for an excuse to revisit it is one that Disney might see as too good to pass up. Mangold’s prediction of it not happening any time soon is likely accurate, given that Dafne Keen will be tied up for some time in the central role of HBO’s fantasy adaptation His Dark Materials, and Mangold is currently working on romantic mystery Juliet, an adaptation of Anne Fortier’s novel about a young woman investigating her family’s history that inspired Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy of doomed lovers. However, Keen is still only 14, so there is plenty of time for her to be able to return to the role at some point in the future should timing ever prove fortuitous.
Next: Theory: The MCU’s X-Men Are Failed Eternals
Source: The Playlist
- New Mutants Release Date: 2020-08-28
