*UPDATE* I've updated the post with the newly released image of Wolverine rockin' the bone claws. So clearly this scene takes place before his trials at the Weapon X facility, which means this is likely a flashback sequence. The rest of the original story is below....
The assumption from the very beginning has been that The Wolverine would be a prequel, keeping in line with the forgettable X-men Origins: Wolverine, and showing how the feral Canadien mutant became the honorable superhero we all know and love. But we never really had any evidence of that. We were just going off of our own expectations and the general idea that the previous X-men films were being ignored until somebody at Fox figured out what to do with them. Turns out that isn't the case at all, as James Mangold has revealed The Wolverine is set after all of the previous X-men movies. He tells Empire....
Mangold: "Where this film sits in the universe of the films is after them all. Jean Grey is gone, most of the X-Men are disbanded or gone, so there’s a tremendous sense of isolation for him."
"That’s something that for me was very important, that I land in a very specific place in his timeline.I wanted to be able to tell the story without the burden of handing it off to a film that already exists and having to conform to it. The ideas of immortality reign very heavily in this story and the burden of immortality weighs heavily on Logan. For me that’s such an interesting part of Logan’s character that is nearly impossible to explore if you have a kind of league or team movie."
This makes it all the more likely that earlier rumors of Famke Janssen making a cameo as Jean Grey are true, as his killing of her in X-men: The Last Stand would no doubt weigh heavily on his mind. But it also leaves the door open for other characters to return, and with talk spreading of "connectivity" between the various X-men movies, this will certainly add fuel to the fire. Mangold also seems to confirm that this is very much a "one-shot" story, designed to focus on this one intriguing aspect of Logan's character, and not as part of a larger storyarc. Mangold does get one thing wrong, though. Logan isn't immortal. He can be killed and will eventually die of natural causes, it'll just take an insanely long time.
Anyway, expect to see more photos from The Wolverine emerging soon, so we'll have those up as soon as they're available.
