Darren Aronofsky’s The Wolverine Will Go To Japan

Darren Aronofsky, one of Yell! Magazine’s favorite directors because of films like Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Black Swan, will be directing the upcoming Wolverine flick. Presently it’s in preproduction and scheduled for release sometime in 2012. Aronofsky announced last November that the film would simply be titled The Wolverine and would star Hugh Jackman.

The Wolverine will not be a sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the Gavin Hood-directed film released back in 2009, but will be an adventure to the Land of the Rising Sun.

From the limited information coming from sources in Hollywood, the film seems to be an adaptation of the 1982 Marvel miniseries comics about Wolverine. At the time Wolverine was the most popular of the X-Men characters, so Chris Claremont (the writer of The Uncanny X-Men comic) and artist Frank Miller (the guy who brought us 300, Ronin, and Sin City) collaborated on a four-book limited series of Wolverine traveling to Japan.

The comic book follows Wolverine’s fight to regain possession of his lover, Mariko Yashida, whose father, Lord Shingen, forced her to marry another man. Eventually, Wolverine kills Lord Shingen, but not before being thrown into a world of assassins and secret organizations for which Japan’s history and culture is famous.

If the film does follow the story from the ’82 comic, which seems likely as Claremont is mentioned when Christopher McQuarrie’s script is talked about (IMDb lists Claremont in the writer category alongside McQuarrie), it should be a fucking blast to watch.

Wolverine versus sword-wielding ninja and samurai is a no-brainer for buzz creation. Let’s hope the film lives up the hype it will produce. With Aronofsky directing and Jackman starring, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

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