Why Did Caliban Appear In Both LOGAN and X-Men Apocalypse?

The Australian actor Hugh Jackman played Logan/Wolverine in the final standalone movie of the franchise directed by James Mangold. He pulled off a masterful performance in Logan which deserves an Oscar nomination. The movie has opened to a massive start with box-office collections in excess of $300 million at the global box-office, making it among the top five R-rated movies. The story of Logan is set up in 2029 which is way past 2024, the year mentioned in the epilog scene of X-Men: Days of Future Past.

The character of Wolverine in the movie is inspired by “Old Man Logan” story based on a dystopian future where villains finally prevailed over Wolverine when supervillain Mysterio laid a trap.

A character played by Stephen Merchant is called Caliban, who is a key player in X-Men comics including apocalypse. He has a special ability to track mutants, once he assembled ‘Morlocks’ to take on a larger enemy. The movie Logan paid a tribute to an original comic were built an underground community of mutants.

The same comic-book character was played by Tomas Lemarquis in X-Men: Apocalypse. He was an information broker in the 1980’s whereas in Logan, he was helping Wolverine to take good care of Professor Charles Xavier in his old age & illness.

So how come the same character appeared in two different X-Men movies and played by different actors?

According to director James Mangold, it’s a pure coincidence. He said in an interview to Nerdist:

“It’s a funny, messy story of how so often these things are not as coordinated as everyone thinks. I actually had written him into our movie, and they didn’t know he was part of Apocalypse, and then they kind of wrote it in their movie, and they cast someone in their movie and I had not seen it and was working away on mine.”

Who would have thought Caliban is this important, as in comics he is hardly of any significance. Good for him.