20th Century Fox took a risk last year with a film that featured a superhero who couldn’t stop talking about masturbation. That ended up a wildly successful venture, but some Fox employees weren’t immediately willing to get on board with another creative leap of faith involving a Marvel property: A gloomy, R-rated Wolverine movie. According to a report in Variety, studio head Stacey Snider explained that “there was real consternation about the intensity of the tone of” James Mangold’s Logan. She continued:
It’s more of an elegy about life and death. The paradigm for it was a Western, and my colleagues were up in arms. It’s not a wise-cracking cigar-chomping mutton-sporting Wolverine, and the debate internally became, isn’t that freakin’ boring? Isn’t it exciting to imagine Wolverine as a real guy and he’s world-weary and he doesn’t want to fight anymore until a little girl needs him?
Though the film hasn’t reviewed yet, the positive advance buzz and swell-looking trailers seem to imply that the gamble was worthwhile.