Hugh Jackman has dropped out of Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s new film Collateral Beauty, the director’s follow-up to his Sundance success story Me And Earl And The Dying Girl. Jackman had to step back from the movie—in which he would have played an advertising executive whose efforts to recover from a personal tragedy lead to unforeseen consequences—in order to continue playing Wolverine, a character who’s apparently as hard to kill off in real life as he is in the pages of Marvel comics.
The film’s producers are in talks with Johnny Depp to replace Jackman, presumably luring him toward the project by outfitting the character with some kind of funny hat and promising to replace co-star Rooney Mara with a fresh pot of mustache wax. If the exchange works out, maybe Jackman can convince Depp to take over the burden of his famous comic book scrapper, too, finally giving audiences the foppish, affectation-laden Wolverine they’ve been demanding for so long. “I’m the best there is at what I do,” he’ll smirk, twirling an elaborate Fu Manchu and adjusting the penguin skeleton nestled in his hair. “And what I do is increasingly hard to bear.”