Logan director James Mangold explains why Mr. Sinister is not in the movie

Have you seen that incredible final trailer for Logan yet? No? Well, then go watch it now! Oh, you have seen it already? WELL THEN GO WATCH IT AGAIN! Okay now that you’ve watched it, did you notice something missing? Something… sinister?

If you haven’t figured it out yet from that bad pun, I am of course referring to classic X-Men villain Mr. Sinister. Before we started getting our first real look at Hugh Jackman’s last turn as Wolverine in Logan, everybody assumed that it would Sinister that the Canadian mutant would be tussling with for his swan song.

This was based on the fact that in the post-credits scene of X-Men: Apocalypse, a blood sample from Wolverine was taken by a mysterious man working for the Essex Corporation. As Mr. Sinister’s real name was Nathaniel Essex and he was a geneticist specializing in cloning, AND we knew that Logan would feature Wolverine’s clone X-23, it just seemed perfectly reasonable to assume the villain would be in the movie. And yet he’s not.

And as Logan director James Mangold explained the CinemaBlend, the reason for Mr. Sinister’s omission is purely because he just wouldn’t fit into the type of movie Logan has become.

Now that you’ve seen some of the movie, I think [what] you get a better sense of is, that’s exactly the kind of thing this movie avoids. Meaning, the kind of operatic highly-costumed, stroboscopic villainy… that’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.

I actually applaud this approach. I loved Mangold’s The Wolverine… but only for about 80% of it, when it was a brooding, violent character drama. Where it went off the rails is in the film’s final act when it suddenly dropped in dopey cartoonish villains, and went full-blown “comic book movie”. Logan appears to be avoiding that pitfall and if it means losing out on a great villain like Mr. Sinister, then that’s a sacrifice I am perfectly fine with.

Last Updated: January 20, 2017