Ever since the Essex Corp. drop at the end of X-Men: Apocalypse, we've been led to believe (through unofficial sources) that Mister Sinister would turn up next in Logan. Every actor cast has been met with speculation they would be playing the villainous geneticist, but something hasn't quite sat right with me. Every frame we've seen from Hugh Jackman and James Mangold has suggested a lean, stripped-down character study free from crazy superheroics, and including Sinister just didn't seem to gel with that. And now Mangold has spoken with Cinemablend to confirm that Sinister won't be in the movie at all, saying that he wants to avoid "the kind of operatic highly-costumed, stroboscopic villainy" of superhero movies. He continues...
"[T]hat’s not in this movie. Everything is kind of as real as we can make it. The movie is trying to kind of take a step backward from that kind of spectacle, so that we get another kind of gain, you know. There’s that loss, but the gain is that the movie feels extremely real and is — as one person who saw the film said to me, ‘I feel like I could go down the street and run into that Wolverine.’ Meaning that this is in my world, not some shiny other world. This is actually taking place in my world."
That's disappointing, but to me it just means Sinister will make his terrible presence felt in an X-Men team movie like X-Force or New Mutants. In the comics he's obsessed with the Summers (Cyclops and Havok) and Grey (Jean Grey) bloodlines so maybe it makes sense to include him where those characters are present.
However, a part of me believes Sinister is in the movie, just in shape-shifted form. That would make sense, too. Logan opens on March 3rd so we'll find out then.
