50 Fun Facts About Logan

Who directed Logan?

James Mangold. Having made The Wolverine with Jackman, he agreed to a third film only if they could drop the save-the-world formula and tell a smaller story about the man himself.

Which comics storyline inspired Logan?

Old Man Logan. Mark Millar's 2008 comic gave the film its ageing hero and cross-country road trip, but most of its other Marvel characters were out of the studio's reach, so the plot is largely new.

Logan's first trailer used Johnny Cash's 'Hurt'; which Cash song plays over the film's end credits?

The Man Comes Around. The director, who made the Cash biopic Walk the Line, said he put the singer in the trailer to separate Logan from other superhero films.

What is slowly poisoning Logan?

His adamantium skeleton. The metal bonded to his bones is leaching poison into his body, and his fading healing factor can no longer keep up with it.

What job is Logan doing at the start of the film?

Limousine driver in El Paso. The fares pay for the black-market medication that keeps Xavier's seizures under control.

Where is Charles Xavier being hidden in Logan?

An abandoned smelting plant in northern Mexico. Xavier lives inside a toppled water tank on the site, kept on sedatives by Logan and Caliban.

What condition causes Xavier's destructive telepathic seizures in Logan?

Dementia. Because Xavier's is the most powerful brain on Earth, its decay makes him a danger to everyone near him, and his mind is classed as a weapon of mass destruction.

Who plays Caliban, the albino mutant tracker who helps care for Xavier in Logan?

Stephen Merchant. The director prized his height: he stands a good six inches over Jackman, and the child playing Laura came up to about his knee.

Who plays Laura in Logan?

Dafne Keen. The 11-year-old won the part over Millie Bobby Brown, who has called her own Logan audition, opposite Hugh Jackman, the best she ever gave.

In Logan, what job did Gabriela do at the laboratory where Laura was raised?

Nurse. Gabriela secretly filmed the experiments on her phone, then helped Laura and other children escape when the company decided to have them killed.

In Logan, what is Eden?

A supposed mutant refuge near the Canadian border. Logan finds its coordinates printed in one of Laura's X-Men comics and insists the place was simply made up by the writers.

Who plays Donald Pierce, Transigen's cyborg head of security, in Logan?

Boyd Holbrook. He played the hunter as a fan of his prey, describing Pierce as an innovative engineer who 'just wants to hang out with' Wolverine.

In Logan, how does Pierce force the captured Caliban to track Laura?

By burning him with sunlight. Caliban's skin cannot bear daylight, a weakness Pierce turns into torture until he agrees to hunt his friends.

Who plays Dr. Zander Rice, the surgical head of Transigen, in Logan?

Richard E. Grant. His surgeon outranks the gunmen: the director called Rice 'the puppet master behind Pierce and the Reavers', the brilliant mind trying to grow mutants.

In Logan, what is X-24?

A feral clone of Logan in his prime. Hugh Jackman plays both parts, so the ageing hero's deadliest opponent is a younger, mindless copy of himself.

In which city does one of Xavier's seizures paralyse an entire hotel in Logan?

Oklahoma City. The psychic blast freezes everyone in the building, including the gunmen sent for Laura, until Logan fights his way upstairs and sedates Xavier with an injection.

Who finally kills Donald Pierce at the end of Logan?

The mutant children. While X-24 keeps Logan busy, the young escapees turn their combined powers, from ice to electricity, on Pierce and finish him together.

Which farming family invites Logan, Laura and Xavier home for dinner?

The Munsons. Eriq La Salle plays the father, Will, who repays the travellers' help on the road with a meal and later rams X-24 with his truck before dying of his wounds.

In Logan, Laura has two claws in each hand and one more in each what?

Foot. Xavier likens her to a lioness, both hunter and carer: the hand claws are for attack, and the single claw in each foot is for defence.

How does Caliban die in Logan?

Setting off grenades among the Reavers. Captured and forced to hunt his friends, he blows up the mercenaries' van from the inside, killing himself, though Pierce survives.

Why does Dr. Rice say no new mutants are born in Logan?

Genetically engineered crops in the food supply. Rice boasts that his company slipped a mutant-suppressing agent into corn syrup found in a huge range of everyday products.

What does the serum Rictor gives Logan do?

Temporarily boosts his healing and strength. Logan injects the whole vial at once and tears through the mercenaries like his younger self, but the effect drains away before the fight is over.

What does Laura use to kill X-24 at the end of Logan?

An adamantium bullet in Logan's revolver. Logan had carried the bullet for years, saving it for the day he decided to end his own life.

How is Logan mortally wounded in the film's final battle?

X-24 impales him on a tree branch. His failing body can no longer heal the wound, and he dies holding Laura's hand as she calls him Daddy.

What does Laura do to Logan's grave marker before leaving?

Tilts the cross into an X. As the other children walk on, she turns back alone, pulls the cross from the grave and lays it on its side.

Which 1953 Western is quoted for Logan's eulogy?

Shane. Laura watches it with Xavier earlier in the film, then speaks the gunfighter's farewell over Logan's grave: 'There are no more guns in the valley.'

Hugh Jackman kept citing The Wrestler and which Clint Eastwood Western as models for Logan?

Unforgiven. Jackman wanted Logan to survive like Eastwood's ageing gunslinger, left alive to carry his killings, but the director held out for the hero's death.

What did Hugh Jackman do to make sure Logan could be R-rated?

Took a pay cut. An R rating shrinks the potential audience, so the director said Jackman gave up part of his salary rather than see the studio insist on a PG-13.

What false title was used to hide Logan's production?

Juarez. The cover barely lasted: a trade listing and the host city's own film office website had tied the name to the Wolverine sequel before cameras rolled.

Although Logan opens on the Texas border, filming began in May 2016 in which US state?

Louisiana. Its 40% film tax credit helped draw the production, which shot there first and then moved on to Mississippi and New Mexico.

Which villain did Liev Schreiber hope to reprise in Logan before the character was cut from the script?

Sabretooth. Co-writer Scott Frank said an early draft gave Logan's old rival a sequence in the middle of the film, but it was written out.

Who composed Logan's score after Cliff Martinez was replaced?

Marco Beltrami. The director turned to a composer he knew well: Beltrami had scored his 3:10 to Yuma, earning an Oscar nomination, and The Wolverine.

At which festival did Logan premiere in February 2017?

Berlin. Watching it there beside Hugh Jackman, who took his hand in the final minutes, Patrick Stewart decided that Logan was the right way to say goodbye to Professor X.

What was the black-and-white version of Logan called?

Logan Noir. Fans loved the black-and-white photos the director posted from the set, so he had the whole film re-graded for a special cinema screening and the home release.

Which short film preceded Logan in US, Canadian and UK cinemas?

Deadpool: No Good Deed. Ryan Reynolds's hero spots a mugging but takes so long changing into his suit in a phone booth that the victim is shot before he steps out.

Logan was nominated for which Academy Award, a first for a live-action superhero film?

Best Adapted Screenplay. No live-action superhero script had been nominated before, not even The Dark Knight's, though the prize itself went to Call Me by Your Name.

Which country was Logan's biggest box-office market outside North America?

China. Censors there cut 14 minutes and a new law made Logan the first film to carry an age warning in its publicity, yet it still took about $106 million.

In Logan, the long-silent Laura speaks her first words in which language?

Spanish. She answers Logan's thanks with 'De nada'; the director had sent his casting team looking for a bilingual girl, one who spoke both Spanish and English.

Which comedian's advice helped convince Hugh Jackman to retire Wolverine with Logan?

Jerry Seinfeld. He told Jackman he ended his sitcom because you never know when your energy or the audience's will tip over into people saying 'Oh, please go'.

Where did Logan kill Zander Rice's father years earlier?

The Weapon X facility at Alkali Lake. Logan killed him while escaping the programme that turned him into a living weapon, which gives Dr. Rice a personal score to settle.

Wolverine debuted in comics fighting which Avenger, a hero Hugh Jackman wished Logan could have met on screen?

Hulk. Wolverine first appeared in a 1974 issue of The Incredible Hulk, sent by Canada's government to attack him; Jackman said a screen meeting might have made him pause before retiring.

In Logan, Laura's journey to Eden ends in which US state?

North Dakota. Logan agrees to take her, insisting there is nothing there, only to find Rictor and the other escaped children hiding out at the spot.

Patrick Stewart called Logan his farewell to Professor X, yet returned in the 2022 sequel to which film?

Doctor Strange. In Multiverse of Madness he plays another universe's Xavier, and he admitted hesitating because Logan had been such a powerful send-off.

Logan opened in 4,071 US cinemas, breaking which war film's record for the widest R-rated release?

American Sniper. Analysts had wondered whether an R rating would limit Logan's audience, but its $88.4 million opening weekend was then the fourth-biggest ever for an R-rated film.

Logan's director pitched it as 'an extremely bloody, existential' version of which film?

Little Miss Sunshine. He built the idea into a fifty-page treatment: a makeshift family on the run by road, with Xavier as the ailing father figure and Logan as his reluctant carer.

Which villain did Bryan Singer say would debut on screen in Logan, only to be left out?

Mister Sinister. X-Men: Apocalypse ended with a man from the Essex Corp collecting a vial of Wolverine's blood, a tease that Logan's script never picked up.

What does Xavier use his powers to round up after a highway accident in Logan?

Runaway horses. A driverless truck forces a family's trailer off the road, and Xavier calms the loose animals with his mind, earning the travellers an invitation to dinner.

How does Logan react while Dr. Rice is explaining his plans in the final battle?

He shoots him mid-sentence. Rice is still boasting about how his company stopped new mutants being born when Logan raises a gun and cuts the villain's speech short for good.

In Logan, what is the hero scraping together money to buy?

A second-hand yacht. He keeps a newspaper ad for a Sunseeker in his car and haggles with the seller by phone, pleading that he needs the boat now.

In Logan, what had one of Xavier's seizures done before the story begins?

Killed several of the X-Men. The film reveals it only in fragments: Logan switches off a radio report about it, and Xavier's own memory of that day returns just before he dies.