Making sense of the X-Men timeline can be
complicated, but when you focus just on Wolverine, the story gets a little easier to follow. From his bloody origin tale to his fateful
final movie, here’s Wolverine’s cinematic story explained. The first chronological glimpse we get of
the boy who grows up to become Wolverine is in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, where
we learn that his name isn't Logan at all. It's James Howlett. Logan is actually the surname of the man who
murders James' father in 1845, which causes James' mutation to activate, pushing bone
claws out from between his knuckles. Enraged, James kills Logan, only to almost
immediately learn that the man was actually his biological father. Young James flees his home along with his
half-brother, Victor Creed, who possesses the same mutant healing ability as James. That healing factor not only makes the boys
practically impossible to kill, but also slows their aging, keeping them looking relatively
youthful as they fight side by side through every major war over the next hundred years. In 2013's The Wolverine, we see that he spent
some of this time in a Japanese POW camp in 1945. While he's there, James saves the life of
Japanese officer Ichirō Yashida from the bombing of Nagasaki, an event which will prove
important many years later. In X-Men: First Class, Charles Xavier and
Erik Lehnsherr, soon to be known as Professor X and Magneto, find themselves up against
Nazi mutant Sebastian Shaw and his team of superpowered henchmen. Realizing they'll need some help to bring
Shaw down, the duo uses Cerebro to find new mutants and form a team of their own, so in
a zippy montage set in 1962, they recruit a handful of young mutants who wind up as
the, well, first class of X-Men. Not everyone is eager to join up, though. When Erik and Charles walk into a bar, a cigar-smoking
James Howlett tells them that he's not interested, using some language that insured the movie
would be a hard PG-13. While fighting together in the Vietnam War,
an increasingly violent Victor assaults a woman, and then kills the officer who tries
to intervene. James rushes to his brother's aid without
realizing what he's done, and both are sentenced to die by firing squad. Needless to say, the execution doesn't go
according to plan. Their miraculous survival catches the eye
of Major William Stryker, and Victor and James are recruited to his black ops team of mutants,
Team X, which also includes a version of Wade Wilson, better known as Deadpool, that we
all do our best to just not talk about. "Hey! It's me! Don't scratch!" It's at this point that James starts going
by the alias Logan, after the father he killed so many decades before. Logan and Victor work with Team X for several
years, but ultimately, Logan decides he can no longer stomach the team's callous disdain
for human life. He quits Team X, but Victor decides to stay,
and the two part ways. Six years after walking away from Team X,
Logan is working as a lumberjack in the Canadian Rockies, but is pulled back into Stryker's
world after Victor murders Logan's girlfriend, Kayla Silverfox. Stryker tells him Victor has gone rogue, and
he asks Logan to join the Weapon X program, giving him a chance to get his revenge on
Victor by undergoing an experimental procedure that will fuse an unbreakable metal called
adamantium to his skeleton. Wolverine agrees, after requesting new dog
tags with the alias "Wolverine." Thanks to the healing factor that allows him
to survive, the procedure is a success. Stryker, never intended to let Logan go free
once it was completed, but Logan manages to escape. When he learns that Victor is kidnapping young
mutants for Stryker, Logan returns to free them and get his revenge. The young mutants are flown to safety by Charles
Xavier while Logan and Victor fight, first against each other, then together against
Deadpool. Once Wade is defeated, Victor leaves, but
before Logan can get out, Stryker shoots him in the head with an adamantium bullet. Logan survives, but when he regains consciousness,
he can't remember his past. Set in the year 2003, X-Men reveals Logan
living as a cage fighter in Canada, still missing most of his memories but using the
alias "Wolverine" thanks to the dog tags he got from Weapon X. He meets young mutant runaway Rogue, and they're
attacked on the road by Victor, who's now called Sabretooth. Curiously, neither brother seems to have any
memory of the other, and unlike Wolverine, Sabretooth looks like a completely different
person now. While Sabretooth has the upper hand, Wolverine
and Rogue are rescued by Storm and Cyclops and taken to Charles Xavier's mansion, where
they join the X-Men. Together with the X-Men, Wolverine fights
Magneto and his Brotherhood of Mutants. The bad guys want to use Rogue's abilities
to power a device that will turn baseline humans into mutants, in response to a proposed
law that would require mutants to register with the government. The X-Men manage to foil Magneto's plot, overcoming
both the Brotherhood and some pretty rough dialogue. "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's
struck by lightning?...The same thing that happens to everything else." The X-Men's victory leads to Magneto's imprisonment,
but the tension between mutants and humans remains. Occuring not long after the events of X-Men,
X2: X-Men United opens with a mutant assassination attempt on the president of the United States,
causing relations between mutants and the U.S. government to become rockier than ever. William Stryker, now much older than the last
time we saw him, receives permission from the president to investigate Xavier, but it's
really a ruse so that Stryker can force Xavier to use Cerebro to destroy all mutants. The X-Men travel to Stryker's base underneath
an abandoned military installation, and when Logan enters the room where he received his
adamantium skeleton, some of his memories return. He attacks Stryker, demanding to know why
the military man did this to him, and he's shocked when Stryker reveals that Logan volunteered
for the Weapon X program. Logan refrains from killing his old foe, but
Stryker ultimately meets his end when a nearby dam bursts, drowning him. Meanwhile, the X-Men have managed to overcome
both Stryker's people and Magneto, who tried to double cross them. In the process, their plane is damaged, leading
Jean Grey, with whom Logan has fallen in love, to telekinetically lift the plane to safety
while holding back the lake. Once her team is safe, she gets swept away
by the rushing water. At the beginning of X-Men: The Last Stand,
set in 2006, Cyclops goes to visit what he thinks is Jean's final resting place. But she's not dead. Naturally, he's overjoyed to learn that she's
still alive, but his delight is short-lived when Jean unceremoniously kills him. Xavier sends Logan and Storm to investigate,
and they're horrified to learn that Jean has been taken over by a destructive power called
the Phoenix. Meanwhile, a so-called "cure" for mutants
has been discovered, and Magneto rebuilds his Brotherhood of Mutants to oppose it. Feeling betrayed by Xavier, who suppressed
the Phoenix when she was a child, Jean kills her mentor and joins with Magneto, but don't
worry. Xavier is only mostly dead. Magneto and the Brotherhood attack the lab
where the cure is held, but during the battle, Jean loses control of the Phoenix and begins
indiscriminately destroying everything around her. Thanks to his healing ability, Logan is the
only one who's able to get close to Jean. In a moment of lucidity, she asks Logan to
save her, and he claws into her chest, killing her and ending the destruction. "I love you." Set in 2013, The Wolverine finds Logan back
in the Canadian wilderness, still agonizing over killing Jean, when he's contacted on
behalf of Ichirō Yashida, the man he saved back in 1945. The message is delivered by Yukio, a mutant
who has the ability to foresee people's deaths, and who has had a vision about Wolverine. "I see you on your back. There's blood everywhere. You're holding your own heart in your hand." While in Japan, Logan realizes that Yashida
didn't ask him there to say farewell. Instead, he wants to steal Logan's immortality
and live forever. Logan loses his adamantium claws battling
Yashida, but he manages to defeat him using his regenerated bone claws. After the fight, Logan leaves Japan, accompanied
by Yukio. In a mid-credits scene set two years later,
Magneto and a very-much-alive Charles Xavier approach Logan in an airport to tell him of
a new threat to wipe out all mutants. X-Men: Days of Future Past opens in the year
2023, when mutants have been driven to near-extinction by the robotic Sentinels. Along with Xavier, Storm, and Magneto, Logan;
who miraculously has his adamantium claws back; has managed to elude the Sentinels long
enough to form a plan. With the future already beyond repair, they
decide to use Kitty Pryde's mutant ability to send Logan's consciousness back to 1973
to stop the events that led to the creation of the Sentinels in the first place, kind
of like in the first Terminator. They hope that, if he's successful, the timeline
will reset, placing them all in an alternate version of 2023. Using his 1973 body piloted by his 2023 consciousness,
Logan joins forces with the younger Xavier and his X-Men to prevent the assassination
that paves the way for the Sentinel program. Although Logan succeeds in his mission, he's
horribly injured in the process, with his mangled body sinking to the bottom of the
Potomac River. However, Logan's 2023 consciousness doesn't
stick around long enough to learn how he survives. As soon as he changes the future, he returns
to an alternate 2023. In this new timeline, Logan is now a teacher
in Xavier's school, where many of the X-Men who'd died in the primary timeline are now
alive again, including Jean Grey. After completing his mission in Days of Future
Past, Logan's maimed body is recovered by a team led by a person who appears to be Stryker,
but is revealed to be Mystique. In X-Men: Apocalypse, it seems that Logan
somehow wound up back under the real Stryker's control anyway. In yet another new timeline, he never escaped
the Weapon X program after gaining his adamantium skeleton in 1979. The X-Men come upon this alternate version
of Logan, who's still being called Weapon X and has no memory of his true identity,
when they infiltrate Stryker's facility in 1983. After Wolverine slaughters many of Stryker's
soldiers, Jean Grey manages to restore some of his memories. Logan runs out into the cold, and Cyclops
speculates that they'll never see him again. Presumably, Jean's intervention paves the
way for Logan to still join the X-Men at some point down the road, leading to the happy
timeline we saw in Days of Future Past. Or maybe not. The Wolverine we meet in Logan is a much older,
more beaten-down version of the character than moviegoers had seen before. After living for nearly two centuries, Logan's
healing ability is finally beginning to fail, and he's growing increasingly ill from adamantium
poisoning. This future version of Logan is working as
a limo driver and caring for an ailing Charles Xavier, and he carries around an adamantium
bullet, pondering the possibility of ending his own life. Despite the happy future Logan returned to
at the end of Days of Future Past, we learn that most mutants, including the X-Men, have
been wiped out anyway. It wasn't the government this time, though:
A few years before the start of the film, Xavier lost control of his powers and inadvertently
killed the rest of the X-Men, a fact which Logan remembers, but Charles has mercifully
forgotten. "I did something…something unspeakable." In 2029, Logan encounters a young girl named
Laura whose powers mirror his own. This kid is determined to get to a mutant
sanctuary in North Dakota called Eden. Charles persuades Logan to take her there,
and the three embark on the journey together. Along the way, they learn that Laura was created
using Logan's DNA as part of the villainous Transigen program. Unfortunately, that DNA was also used to create
X24, a vicious clone that looks exactly like Logan did in his prime. Before they can reach Eden, X24 kills Charles,
but Logan and Laura manage to escape. Laura convinces Logan to continue onto Eden,
and when they get there, they find the other mutant children who've escaped Transigen. Laura and the kids make plans to escape into
Canada, but before they can, they're attacked by Transigen soldiers and X24. The children defeat the soldiers, but Logan
is no match for his new and improved clone, who impales him on a fallen tree. Before X24 can finish him off, Laura shoots
him in the head with Logan's adamantium bullet. Logan dies holding Laura's hand, metaphorically
fulfilling Yukio's vision that he would die with "his heart in his hand." Laura and the other mutant children escape
to Canada, leaving behind Wolverine's grave, which is marked with an "X." Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite
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