Hugh Jackman is currently shooting his latest outing as the adamantium-clawed mutant Logan in director James Mangold's X-Men spin-off The Wolverine, and while it had been assumed that film would serve as a prequel to the original X-Men trilogy, Mangold has now confirmed that's not the case:"Where this film sits in the universe of the films is after them all. Jean Grey is gone, most of the X-Men are disbanded or gone, so there’s a tremendous sense of isolation for him," says Mangold in the latest issue of Empire Magazine (via ComicBookMovie). "That’s something that for me was very important, that I land in a very specific place in his timeline. I wanted to be able to tell the story without the burden of handing it off to a film that already exists and having to conform to it. The ideas of immortality reign very heavily in this story and the burden of immortality weighs heavily on Logan. For me that’s such an interesting part of Logan’s character that is nearly impossible to explore if you have a kind of league or team movie."
Although the majority of The Wolverine will take place after X-Men: The Last Stand, we do know that the film will contain some World War II sequences, with Jackman previously snapped filming on a Japanese prisoner of war camp set, while the latest official image released via Empire (see above) clearly shows a pre-Weapon X, bone-clawed Logan.
The Wolverine is scheduled for release on July 26th, 2013, and sees Jackman joined in the cast by Will Yun Lee (Total Recall) as Harada (a.k.a. the Silver Samurai), Brian Tee (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) as Noburo Mori, Hiroyuki Sanada (The Last Samurai) as Shingen, Hal Yamanouchi (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) as Yashida and Svetlana Khodchenkova (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) as Viper, along with newcomers Rila Fukushima as Yukio and Tao Okamoto as Mariko.
