In a movie full of them, Dafne Keen’s Laura/X-23 is definitely a major highlight of Logan. The young actress is completely silent (aside from her primal battle cries) for over half the film, but says all she needs to with nothing more than a glance or a rare smile. For this reason alone, many fans look forward to Keen reprising the role at some point down the road, although the manner of Laura’s return is still up in the air.
One man that seems fairly certain about which story an X-23 spinoff should follow though is the character’s creator, Craig Kyle. During an interview with THR, the writer expressed his gratitude towards director James Mangold and his team for bringing the ferocious young mutant to the big screen in such a faithful manner, and also laid out his ideal scenario for any potential spinoff:
I’d love to see some of the stories that we told [in the comics], see as much as we can of how she came to be, but then really get into the stories of what she was forced to do an commit. She said she killed people. She said bad people. The bulk of who X-23 and Laura killed in the comic books were bad people, but she did kill some children. She did kill a whole press corps. I think there’s something powerful about watching her go through those horrors without any say and without any ability to not take those actions.
A story I always wanted to tell was, once she’s free and once she’s gone through what she’s gone through, the only way she can have a hope for a future is for her to go back and trace the lives that remained and were harmed by the actions she was forced to commit. You put her on this journey of redemption… She can go through them one by one and face everyone affected by the murders she was forced to commit, if she can get to the end of that road without being killed by those that remain, there’s something on the other side of that.
While that would no doubt make for an interesting plot, the majority of fans seem to want Laura to take up the mantle of Wolverine in Logan’s absence, just as she did in the comics fairly recently. Of course, it’s not even a sure thing that there will be an X-23 movie – though Mangold and and Keen have expressed interest – so we’ll just have to see how all this plays out. For now, we can take comfort in the fact that Logan was everything we’d hoped it would be and more, giving the titular hero the sendoff he deserved.