Hugh Jackman admits ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ “could have done better”
Fictional or inspired by real life, Hugh Jackman has played some truly monumental characters throughout his career.
From musical heroes to animated rats to inspirational circus leaders (who were actually horrible people in real life), the Aussie heartthrob has done it all, but we all know there’s one alter ego he is never going to shift.
From the moment Jackman first appeared as Wolverine in the first X-Men movie, he and the character formed a permanent bond. Despite initially having no idea how to play the mutant, he quickly made the iconic hero his own. Since the turn of the millennium, he has played Wolverine in a total of ten different movies, a record for a comic book character, and considering he has already un-retired once, expect that number to keep going up.
One of the most infamous appearances Jackman made as the cigar-chomping Canadian was in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which was set years before the first X-Men trilogy and was designed to explore how a young boy named James Howlett became the gruff, adamantium-claw-wielding badass we know and love today. The film looked to be in a good place, with a strong premise, a good cast (including will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, for some reason), and was released just as superhero movies were really beginning to take off. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the impact that many hoped it would.
The box office returns on Origins were significantly less than the previous two X-Men entries, which implied that either Wolverine wasn’t the draw people thought he was or that the appetite for the franchise as a whole was close to being whetted. To make matters worse, the movie failed to blow critics away and was deemed unnecessary and flimsy, a clear attempt to cash in on the series without offering anything of substance.
And then there was Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds’ first attempt at playing Wade Wilson, who went down like a fart in church. Fans couldn’t believe how much they had butchered their beloved character, with the whole thing feeling like it was made to deliberately piss people off.
In an interview with NME several years after the film’s release, Jackman admitted that he may have let his personal agenda get in the way of the project. “I had something to prove, and we could have done better,” he confessed, “Somehow, the first Wolverine movie ended up looking like the fourth X-Men, just with different characters. I left unsure if we’d achieved our goal, which was to make sure people understood my character.”
Essentially, while they were big business in 2009, superhero movies were not the legacy-defining safety net they would go on to become, and as such, Jackman’s reference points would have been people like Wesley Snipes and the cast of the Fantastic Four movies’ initial success, which faded away over time. Even his own group wasn’t safe, as many of the actors who had played key X-Men characters were quickly forgotten following the release of The Last Stand. Origins was his chance to prove that he could carry a movie entirely on his own, and it sort of flopped.
As we all know, Jackman did eventually prove that Wolverine was a viable solo character with the resounding success of Logan, but in 2009, that seemed equally as precarious.
