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There was once a time when Hugh Jackman Wolverine cameos made a sort of sense. Bursting out of a cell in full Weapon X gear, massacring half a bunker, then vanishing, in 2016’s otherwise pretty forgettable X-Men: Apocalypse. Telling potential recruitment team Magneto and Professor X to, er, go fuck themselves while propping up a bar in 2011’s X-Men: First Class. Even popping up via archived footage from X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2018’s Deadpool 2. These were cameos we could accept: quick, self-contained sideshows that understood the sacred rule that such things ought to be fun and brief. They also arrived at a time when Jackman didn’t yet carry the weight of 25 years of audience investment.
Last week, in an appearance on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show, Jackman revealed that he has banned himself from saying no to future appearances as the surly mutant. “I am never saying ‘never’ ever again,” he said. “But I did mean it when I said ‘never’, until the day when I changed my mind. But I really did for quite a few years, I meant it.” There are suggestions that he could make a brief appearance in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday, in order to capitalise on the success of Marvel’s recent $1bn megahit Deadpool & Wolverine, even though he wasn’t mentioned in an interminable name-on-chair live stream from earlier this year, in which most of the main cast members were revealed.
This would, of course, be a terrible idea. Cameo Wolverine has been done to death, and the only reason for him to make an appearance in Marvel’s next major episode would be if he was somehow pivotal to its events. Perhaps he could be responsible for the multiversal fender-bender that leads Doctor Doom out of the retro universe we encountered in Fantastic Four: First Steps, and into the main continuum. Maybe he’s the reluctant hinge, the weary hero whose only narrative purpose now is to slam one universe shut so another can creak open.
Others have suggested Jackman’s future role in the Marvel universe could be to act as a sort of nostalgic mascot to the next generation of X-Men, the more youthful variants the studio is expected to parachute in from other realities (or elsewhere) during the events of the next two Avengers movies. But when the young mutants emerge, will they feel instantly second-tier standing next to the definitive Wolverine? Marvel needs its new mutants to carry the franchise – does having the guy who’s done this for a quarter of a century undermine the point of the reboot before it’s even launched?
There’s no doubting that Jackman-as-Wolverine can be box office gold. Fox wouldn’t have allowed him three deeply mercurial solo outings if he wasn’t dynamite in the suit. But there’s only so many times you can wheel out different variants of the same perpetually exhausted claw-gremlin before even diehard fans start feeling as if they’ve been locked in franchise Groundhog Day. And Fox already did its old man Logan riff in 2017.
There’s an argument that the more Marvel leans on Jackman for cheap dopamine hits, the less power he has left. Each new appearance devalues the last. But if it does have to happen, make it a solo outing in which Jackman is front and centre. Deliver a storyline that doesn’t end with him sacrificing himself for the greater good, or somebody else’s character build, but still allows him to wander off into the half-feral hinterland where all good Wolverines eventually retire.
