James Mangold is an uncommon franchise film director, with a resumé (especially of late, where his stints in the blockbuster mines have included dips into the X-Men and Indiana Jones franchises, with Star Wars on its way) that screams “hired hand”—but a filmography that suggests a deep commitment to telling stories that make actual human beings out of the boxes of action figures he regularly gets handed. That’s especially clear in 2017’s Logan, which takes a very silly premise—what if Wolverine got old and sad and had to fight a younger, less sadversion of himself?—and made something genuinely poignant out of it.
So, how does the Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny director feel about Hugh Jackman deciding to revive the character, 7 years after his “death”, to do poop and fart jokes with Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool? Resigned, is the vibe we’re getting, and certainly not thrilled.
This is per a profile on Mangold out in Variety today, which is mostly about Dial Of Destiny, which tasks the Cop Land director with playing pinch-hitter for Steven Spielberg. But he does field a question about Logan, and, yeah, not jazzed. Here’s the full, semi-bleak response:
I can’t say that there’s a part of me that doesn’t wish that we’d let it be. But there was always going to be another Wolverine. There could be a baby Wolverine and a cartoon Wolverine. As much liquid as they can squeeze out of that rag, they’re going to try to. I don’t measure my success on a movie like Logan with whether we ended the conversation.
I ended my conversation.
We are not psychologists, but we’re pretty sure that overjoyed directors don’t refer to franchise’s they’ve worked on as dripping rags being relentlessly squeezed out by the relentless hands of the studio. Still, it hasn’t stopped Mangold from continuing on his particular odd course of mindful franchise movie-making: He’s got a Swamp Thing movie on the books at DC Films, and a Star Wars movie, described as “a Ten Commandments about the dawning of the Force,” in the works at Disney, so those rags are just gonna keep getting squeezed, it seems.
