When We Predict Wolverine Will Finally Appear In The MCU
The X-Men are officially in the MCU thanks to Disney, Marvel, and Fox merger; when will Wolverine appear in the film franchise shared universe?
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With the X-Men back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe fold in the wake of the Disney/20th Century Fox merger, it’s only a matter of time before the most famous member of that superhero team makes its way into the MCU: Wolverine, a character who made his first full-fledged Marvel Comics appearance in The Incredible Hulk issue #181. From there, the character became exceedingly popular, particularly through his appearances during Chris Claremont’s take on the X-Men roster. This popularity made it inevitable that Wolverine would eventually make his way into other forms of media, including film.
Wolverine made his big-screen debut in the 2000 feature film X-Men, with Hugh Jackman starring in the role. Over the next two decades, Wolverine became an essential part of the X-Men movie franchise and even got to headline a trilogy of solo movies that culminated in the Oscar-nominated box-office smash Logan. Whether in comics or the original X-Men movies, Wolverine has become an enduring fan-favorite figure. Now that the X-Men are set to get a full revamp under Disney, it seems like only a matter of time before Wolverine will debut in the MCU.
In order to answer that question, it’s important to look not at other X-Men movies, but other MCU movies based on characters that have previously appeared in solo movies. When it came to The Incredible Hulk or Tom Holland’s Spider-Man titles, Marvel Studios was very careful about not just retreading ground already covered by the characters’ prior movie appearances. For Incredible Hulk, this meant making a new movie that would incorporate more recognizable classic Hulk villains from the comics. Meanwhile, the MCU Spider-Man films made it a point to emphasize the web-crawler’s origin – an element preceding entries minimized – while eschewing adversaries like Doctor Octopus or The Lizard that the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield versions of the character had already faced in their films.
Keeping those examples in mind, it’s likely Marvel’s approach to the X-Men will similarly emphasize aspects of the X-Men comics that were ignored by the 20th Century Fox movies, as well as minimize the presence of elements that were at the forefront of prior X-Men productions. Considering Wolverine was the de facto protagonist of not just his own three solo movies but also all but two of the main X-Men movies, one can expect Marvel Studios to put him on the back burner. Instead of Wolverine being the automatic lead character once again, expect lesser-seen mutant characters to take the spotlight in initial MCU appearances of the X-Men.
Marvel’s clear love of both ensemble efforts and more obscure characters through films like The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Eternals makes it logical that the focus will be on mutants who haven’t yet really had a chance to shine. This makes a Phase 4 debut for Wolverine pretty unlikely. None of the X-Men appear to have any presence in any of the announced Phase 4 projects, and it’s doubtful a cosmic-bound production like Eternals has room for a Wolverine cameo.
An X-Men movie in Phase 5 could provide a Wolverine appearance, though it would likely be just a tease for his role in Phase 6 and beyond adventures, while the central focus remained on other mutant characters. Although Wolverine fans will probably have a long wait until this Canadian superhero re-emerges on the big screen, at least they have twenty years worth of movies featuring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine to fall back on while the Marvel Cinematic Universe prepares its own version of the character.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/marvel-mcu-wolverine-xmen-introduce-when-prediction/