WARNING: Spoilers ahead.
People have been raving about how good Logan is, a departure from your usual Marvel movie. It stars a battered old Logan suffering from adamantium poisoning. It’s a grim affair, with lots of in-your-face violence (literally) and a dark, bleak vibe that’s sure to take the sunshine out of your day.
The movie takes place in a future where the X-Men are dead and very few mutants are left. In a scene during the first act of the movie, Professor Xavier gives a clue about this as he thinks about his old X-family, prompting a gloomy Logan to respond with: “They’re gone now.” Since there’s no backstory about how the X-Men’s demise came about, this left some people wondering how Logan ties in with the rest of the X-Men movies.
What you should know is that Logan (the movie) is loosely based on Old Man Logan — a comic book series first published in 2008 that was set in an alternate universe where Wolverine accidentally kills his fellow X-Men and young students in Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. It turns out that the attack was an illusion created by Mysterio, and the supposed attackers were in fact his teammates. The incident traumatizes Logan, who vows not to use his claws again, psychologically breaking his Wolverine persona.
