X-Men: Apocalypse is adding a few new, young mutants to the First Class line-up, including a young Jean Grey, Scott Summers and Storm, but one beloved X-Men movie regular is missing: Wolverine. Yes, despite jumping through time-travel hoops seemingly just to have Wolverine join the X-Men franchise in Days of Future Past, everybody's favorite mutant with the good hair is missing from the main plot of Apocalypse. That said, it wouldn't really be an X-Men movie without at least a cameo appearance from Wolverine, and in the final trailers, filmmakers have confirmed that there is a Wolverine cameo in X-Men: Apocalypse . And, now that the movie's out, we can finally talk about it. But if you haven't seen Apocalypse, be warned, because spoilers lie ahead.
Unlike his brief scene in First Class, Wolverine's cameo in Apocalypse isn't played for laughs, but is more of an action role. Without going into the events that preface Wolverine's cameo, here's how Hugh Jackman made his violent return in Apocalypse. When William Stryker imprisons Mystique, Quicksilver, Moira MacTaggert and Hank/Beast on a secret military base in the mountains, students Jean Grey, Scott Summers and Kurt/Nightcrawler sneak in to try to break them out and, in an attempt to distract some of the guards, they open the door to a cell where an animal/weapon is being held, only to let loose a murderous Weapon X, aka Wolverine.
For those of you not in the know, Weapon X is the secret program that made Wolverine a weapon. They're the ones that gave him is metal skeleton (and claws) and messed with his memory, turning him into a monster born to kill. And kill, he does. By the time everything's all said and done, and the students rescue the teachers, Wolverine has killed almost every soldier on the base.
If you're thinking Wolverine's cameo is nothing more than just a fun tease for Weapon X fans, don't be fooled. The cameo could potentially be a set up for future Wolverine movies. Speaking about the Wolverine cameo in Apocalypse, director Bryan Singer told Empire , "It hints to a sequence that again fits within the canon of all six movies, and the birth of a new direction. It's not insignificant, nor is it simply just a throw-in."
After all the killing, Jean stops Wolverine and uses her powers to see inside his mind. She can't find much, but she is able to restore a few, short memories she can find, giving Wolverine just a hint of who he might be. It's not much, but it's enough to send a slightly less murder-loving Wolverine running away into the forest. Thus we see how Wolverine escaped Weapon X and embarked on his journey to find out who he really is. Which, after all, is just how we met him in the first X-Men movie. (On a more creepy level, Wolverine's cameo might also foreshadow Wolverine's obsession with an adult Jean Grey when they meet again.)
Wolverine's appearance in Apocalypse may be brief, but there's good reason to believe that it might set up a whole new wave of Wolverine movies to come.
Images: 20th Century Fox; Giphy (2)
