RUMOR: Wolverine May Get His Own Disney+ Marvel Series
A new rumor about a potential future Marvel series for Disney+ has surfaced, indicating that Marvel Studios may be looking to reboot Wolverine through television instead of retelling his origin in another X-Men standalone. If the rumors are true, then the series will cover the Mutant superhero’s origin story (but competently this time).
It’s been stated that the upcoming Disney+ streaming service is going to provide a crucial new pillar to the vastly-growing setting, with the introduction of multiple television series that will be directly tied to the movies themselves (as opposed to the other shows in the setting, which have a tenuous relationship to the movies at best, even though they’re still considered “canon” to it). And yes, the X-Men franchise with its ubiquitous number of memorable characters seems like it’d find itself home on the service, but right now that won’t happen until the ink has dried on the Disney/Fox deal. Thankfully, word is that the deal should go through sometime between early February and early March (if not in the next few days), considering that the deal looks to be pretty unstoppable at this point.
But just because they can’t actively develop ideas doesn’t mean that concepts aren’t being discussed; after all, Kevin Feige and Adam McKay talked about how they’d want to approach a hypothetical Silver Surfer movie in the MCU even though they didn’t have the rights at the time (and still don’t). In a podcast from MCU Cosmic (hat tip HNE Entertainment), host Jeremy Conrad explained that he’d heard a rumor that Marvel are discussing plans for X-Men series even if they won’t be able to actively develop them for another few weeks. And this rumor sounds a lot like a certain murderous, grouchy Canadian superhero is going to star in his own limited series:
“[The possible X-Men show that I’ve heard rumors about is] not necessarily X-Men – like ‘X-Men team’ – from what I heard. The rumor I heard is that it would be a single certain character, one character, a very popular X-Men character showing their origin for the first time onscreen done well. The actual legitimate origin of this character and that’s how they’d introduce that character to the MCU and then that character would be really big in the movies. But they would do their backstory and origin as a Disney+ series like 2020 or so.”
Conrad has previously hinted that the Fantastic Four franchise may get a similar “retroactive backstory” treatment from Marvel Studios as well, with one of his earlier hints suggesting that a city within the Quantum Realm (which was seen briefly in Ant-Man and the Wasp) is the current home to the Fantastic Four, explaining why they’ve been absent from the setting so far. The X-Men franchise, being tied to an entire race of superhumans, is a tougher nut to crack, so using a limited series to have Wolverine Forrest Gump his way through the MCU’s history might just be the perfect way of explaining why it’s taken so long for Mutants to show up – perhaps they were always here, and some sort of cosmic shenanigans that will come out of the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame will serve as a catalyst for a true Mutant Genesis in Phase 4 of the MCU.
I should note that this rumor does not explicitly allude to Wolverine by name, aside from the possible subtle jab at X-Men Origins: Wolverine for not being a proper representation of the character’s origin story. Upon hearing about this, I couldn’t help but remember an observation that I saw from a Hollywood insider, one which doubled as a thinly-veiled hint of what may come in the future, and hints at Wolverine being one of the first X-Men characters to get a Disney+ series:
A #WeaponX mini-series on Disney+ serving as a prequel of sorts to the MCU (inserting the #XMen mythology into it) sounds pretty good to me. Not that I’ve heard that could happen…. ?
— Daniel Alter (@DAlter007) December 27, 2018
That’s a pretty clear nudge-nudge-wink-wink way of approaching this. But Wolverine himself is one of Marvel’s most popular characters, and one with the most crossover potential, being one of the few X-Men to moonlight as an Avenger (and join a few other teams in his spare time), so it would make sense to launch him before the release of a new X-Men movie. Wolverine is also over a century old, which would create a number opportunities to explore the MCU’s past – as a soldier in World War II, Wolverine could run into Captain America and potentially rescue a young Magneto from Nazis, and Nathaniel Essex (AKA Mister Sinister) could play into how Wolverine gets involved in the Weapon X program in the first place. And that opens the door for tons of cameos in other period-piece Marvel movies that are made from now until doomsday, provided that they’re set after the 1880s.
If this rumor is true, then a show would spare us the trouble of having another movie that’s focused on telling Wolverine’s origin. The excellent X2 showed audiences glimpses at the utter torture that Wolverine went through to get Adamantium implanted into his bones, but didn’t tell us much before that. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was meant to provide some answers, but it ended up being a notorious victim of a hard-hitting writer’s strike, a director becoming increasingly frustrated with the studio he was working for, and an executive meddling with the project as much as possible (giving us, among other things, Deadpool doing his best Baraka cosplay while his mouth was sewn shut). The end result was clear with a glorious trainwreck of a film with a handful of redeeming qualities (most of which happen in the first act). X-Men: Apocalypse added Wolverine into a major sequence with a different take on his origin through reshoots, in hopes that it would boost interest in the project, but it ultimately felt like an afterthought in a narrative that was already pretty overstuffed. So if film isn’t the best medium to tell this story, perhaps a limited series might just be.
A Wolverine: Weapon X series may or may not be in discussion at Marvel Studios. Current projects confirmed to be in development for Disney+ include Loki, The Vision and Scarlet Witch, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Numerous other projects are rumored to be in development.
Grant Davis is a freelance writer who has covered entertainment news for more than seven years. His articles have frequently appeared in Star Wars News Net as well as as other entertainment-related websites. As someone who grew up on Star Wars and comic book movies, he’s completely thrilled with the current era of genre entertainment.
