Hugh Jackman is set to don the adamantium claws one last time for 20th Century Fox’s upcoming third Wolverine movie, with James Mangold in the director’s chair, and now TheWrap has revealed who’ll be penning the beloved mutant’s final ride: Blade Runner 2 scribe Michael Green.
Mangold will work with Green to ensure that his new take adheres closely to the director’s own vision for the action-packed pic. The scribe has written for Smallville, Heroes, Kings and The River over on the television side of things, but he’s perhaps best known for writing the (rather terrible) Green Lantern. Still, Green has lined up some pretty stellar gigs since then, including a re-write on Ridley Scott’s Prometheus 2 and a script for Denis Villeneuve’s hotly anticipated Blade Runner 2 (co-written with Hampton Fancher), which may star Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling. He’s also attached to adapt Agatha Christie’s murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express.
Mangold is expected to direct the third Wolverine film next, now that Christian Bale’s ACL injury has delayed production (and possibly even killed) mystery adaptation The Deep Blue Good-by, in which Bale would have played Travis McGee. No plot details have yet emerged, but Jackman confirmed that the film will mark his last on-screen portrayal of the powerful X-Men member, who has been one of Fox’s most massively popular characters ever since 2000’s X-Men. Very few actors are as tied to their characters in the public eye as Jackman is to Wolverine, so it’s expected that this upcoming movie will be the last time audiences will see the character embodied on screen for a long, long time (or at least until the entire X-Men cinematic universe gets a reboot).
The still-untitled Wolverine sequel will hit theaters on March 3rd, 2017.