One last ride… in the X-Hoverchair.
Patrick Stewart, whose Charles Xavier has been a major staple in the X-Men franchise since Bryan Singer’s first mutant outing in 2000, has announced that the latest installment, James Mangold’s Logan, will be his official last appearance as the telepathic professor. The film has been publically marketed as Hugh Jackman’s last take on the adamantium riddled mutant bad-ass, Wolverine, as well.
ComicBookMovie.com reported that after an emotional SiriusXM Town Hall early screening of the film, due out this Friday in wide release, Stewart stated, “I realized there will never be a better, a more perfect, a more sensitive, emotional, and beautiful way of saying au revoir to Charles Xavier than this movie. So, I told [Jackman] that same evening, ‘I’m done too. It’s all over.’”
It comes as no surprise that Logan will be Stewart’s last mutant feature as after the soft reboot of the X-Men: First Class prequel saga and the remarkable X-Men: Days of Future Past, future X-Men films are likely to focus on the younger, alternative past versions of the fan-favorite mutants, including James McAvoy’s Professor X and Michael Fassbender’s Magneto.
After this Friday’s Logan, the upcoming X-Men universe films in development at Fox are a sequel to 2016’s Deadpool, The New Mutants, and the next First Class film, which will be set in the 1990’s.