Mark Millar Breaks Down How OLD MAN LOGAN Story Could Work in WOLVERINE 3 Without MCU Characters

We've already written about comic writer Mark Millar once this morning, when the consultant on 20th Century Fox's Marvel Comics characters spoke about the failure of Fantastic Four but still called young director Josh Trank "brilliant." Now IGN has more from that interview, and this time Millar is talking about Old Man Logan, his 2008 comic that Hugh Jackman wants to use as inspiration for Wolverine 3. When asked how a movie version of that comic could work without the use of characters owned by Marvel Studios (including a blind Hawkeye, the Hulk, and many more), here's how Millar responded:

"They're not important to the story. The way I worked that thing is I actually structured it as, I broke it down mechanically - I figured out going from this part of America to that part of America and what he would encounter along the way, and then I added in the adversities later. Basically Wolverine doing The Road movie is the important thing and he has a friend [a blind Hawkeye] with him. But that friend could be Cyclops and he could be blind by the fact that his ruby-quartz visor is broken and he has to keep his eyes closed the whole time and everything, but still insists on driving the car they're crossing America with. There's lots of stuff. Instead of the Hulk, you could have the Blob or something.

“Honestly, the continuity stuff is the most boring side of it. I kind of like it, keeping it in the X-Men universe a little, too, because comic fans are different from the mainstream world. I know this stuff backwards because I've lived my whole life loving this stuff, but most people don't know all the minutia and everything so I think keeping it simplified and keeping it generally X-Men universe is a smarter thing to do.”

Sounds like Millar's not being precious about the details, likely because it's inevitable that the film won't be able to use the same characters that appear in the comic. Though Sony and Marvel Studios came to an agreement about the use of Spider-Man, Fox and Marvel Studios seem to be bitter enemies, so there's no way Marvel would approve the use of its characters, regardless of the fact that this is Jackman's final film. Marvel Studios doesn't give a damn about how 20th Century Fox's Marvel movies perform — in fact, they're probably hoping they fail like Fantastic Four did, because if people stop paying to see Fox's superhero films, it'd eventually be a better investment for Fox to sell the characters back to Marvel Studios.

We'll see how the writers end up changing the story to better fit into the world of the X-Men universe when James Mangold's Wolverine 3 arrives in theaters on March 3rd, 2017.