James Mangold on Wolverine’s costume and sequel ideas.

I Am Rogue spoke with THE WOLVERINE director James Mangold, who tried to make valid points for leaving out Logan’s comic book costume cameo from the film. Mangold didn’t want to create the false notion of the suit appearing “Days of Future Past” or the developing sequel to “The Wolverine”. The clip appears as a deleted scene on the December 3rd Blu-ray release.

“I had the prop department make a box, which frankly when we shot it was empty because I didn’t have the money nor did I have the go ahead to build a Wolverine uniform at that moment in the movie,” said Mangold. “But the trick was this, in a way I felt like I was handing off a little bit of a hot potato to the next movie, and I know that the studio felt that way. They thought that audiences would dig it but that it wouldn’t completely work. We did in fact even use it at a test screening. We screened it in front of an audience and the funny thing is that except for hardcore Wolverine fans, of which is a significant portion of the people coming, a vast majority of the audience ended the movie scratching their heads not understanding what was in the box.

“So you had A) the fact that there is going to be a significant, like 60% of the audience is not going to understand what the last image of the movie meant, so that is a problem. Then B) is that you are then going to create this huge expectation that Logan is going to be in that outfit in another movie immediately. I felt like it was a little bit passive aggressive and that for a little bit of juice at the end I was handing someone else, or potentially me, the problem of now dealing with what was in the box in the next picture. Lastly, it bumped when I then went to Montreal and shot the end credit scene that kind of hands off to X-Men: Days of Future Past. I went to the set of Days of Future Past because everyone was there, and I shot that scene on a weekend. But it bumped between the two. I tried and it was kind of weird in the sense that he was opening this thing and finding this uniform and then you are cutting the scene with him in this airport. It was kind of like, huh? It made you think there was something missing. All of these things were at the forefront but nothing more than the anxiety that the studio had that I was somehow guaranteeing that the next time you saw him he’d be in it. So that is the honest journey of it.”

When asked if “The Wolverine” sequel would be set during the 2-year gap between the Logan and Yukio jetting off and him running into Xavier and Magneto at the airport, Mangold said “That is a good observation. I honestly have sketches and ideas, but there are many alternatives and that certainly is indeed a window that exists. I can tell you that in determining where we are going I’m not solely relying on my own imagination but also the imaginations that have spun great stories about Wolverine in the comics.”