There Are Fully Eight Directors in the Running for The Wolverine

In order to finally release Hugh Jackman from the purgatory of maintaining museum quality abs in anticipation of maybe, someday, filming another Wolverine movie since everything on the production is basically ready to go as soon as a director is down for the project, Fox Studios is pressing ahead with the search for a director for The Wolverine.

And the list is long.

Doug Liman (Mr. And Mrs. Smith, okay, that movie was good fun), Justin Lin (Fast Five. No. No no no no no no no. No.), Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, sure, why not), and James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted and 3:10 to Yuma? We’ll take it), Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go, mostly a music video director, hmm, that’s not promising), and Gavin O’Connor (Warrior, well, a movie about Wolverine trying to deal with his amnesia by learning to fight in Japan could have a lot of thematic elements in common with a boxing movie).

Jose Padilha is the seventh contender, but since he’s already signed to the RoboCop remake, he’s probably out of the running. MGM really needs some blockbusters out there to recover from its bankruptcy, and probably wouldn’t take kindly to him skipping off to do a different superhero entirely.

But who are we really rooting for? That’s an easy choice. The one who’s already done a Wolverine movie (or at least, a fan trailer for one, Gary Shore. Because we didn’t expect Wolverine: Origins to be much more than a number of really beautiful fight sequences strung along on a plot like riveting beads on a thin wire. And that’s exactly what we got. And we damn well enjoyed it. We wouldn’t mind seeing it again, except this time in Japan.

It also contained a cameo from Ma and Pa Kent, so that was cool too.

(via the A.V. Club.)