The Hollywood Reporter is now confirming what we’ve been hearing for last couple of days. That indeed Fox, Hugh Jackman, and filmmakers were always planning on making Wolverine 3 an R-rated film.
It was put together with the R-rating in mind a while ago and way before Deadpool was ever on anyone’s radar. They reaffirm our position that both X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine had almost become R-rated features themselves.
When Fox turned up at last summer’s Comic Con to promote Hugh Jackman’s upcoming and finalWolverine movie, the studio revealed a teaser image showing the brooding mutant superhero giving the middle finger, or rather, middle claw.
That early piece of marketing was a signal that Jackman and the filmmakers wanted to up the intensity factor and make an R-rated movie — long before Fox’s Deadpool proved this month that superhero movies don’t need to be rated PG-13 to become mega hits at the box office.
Insiders say the untitled Wolverine threequel, which James Mangold begins shooting in a month, was always designed as a movie that would receive an R from the ratings board once finished because of the level of violence (and likely language) in the script written by Michael Green.
There had been talk of making that film, as well X-Men Origins: Wolverine(2009), R-rated, but both films went out with a friendlier PG-13.
Michael Green, who was brought in to do rewrites on the script had two previous writing assignments that were R-rated films with Blade Runner 2 and Alien: Covenant. Green could have been hired to help tackle the mature material.
This is not surprising considering the first teaser image revealed at Comic-Con had Logan flipping-the-bird, and then Jackman named Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan.
Old Man Logan, has been the source material linked to this final film for years, which is hyper violent and impossible to land a PG-13 rating without deflating it big time. I don’t think people really understand how brutal the comics are, and just assume that they could make them accessible to children, which is just straight-up bizarre to me.
Fox commissioned a mature video game tie-in for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which many children couldn’t purchase or play. The studio has always had a darker Wolverine in mind, but finally have the balls to do so, with Jackman’s final outing. Deadpool director Tim Miller actually worked on that game.
SOURCE: HOLLYWOOD REPORTER