The mutant team called the X-Men has influenced pop culture to a large degree, they have been the gateway for the superhero movie craze that only seems to be getting bigger and bigger and they are the responsible for introducing one of the most bad-ass characters that fans can never get enough of. Wolverine had enjoyed a success that no other X-men member has had, so when it came to saying farewell to the character in Logan, it would only be logical to feature the team that made him famous. And they nearly were in Logan.
James Mangold, the director of Logan discussed with ComingSoon about the possibility that never really panned out:
“Yeah, I wrote that scene. I wrote it, and at one point, it was even the first scene in the movie. [But] it … made the movie about that. It was really interesting. It suddenly made the movie about X-Men dying, as opposed to allowing the movie to be a kind of unwinding onion, like allowing you to kind of enter the story and go, ‘Where is this going?’ It was so large and loomed so large, and I felt like it also was still falling into the formula of the movies, with the big opener, that is setting up the mythology first. I thought, ‘What if we do an opener that leans into character first? Actually underplay those things?’ Let them just feel like it’s more like a… normal thing.”
As Mangold said, involving the X-Men would have changed the whole story of Logan which was about characters dealing with their demons.
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The exclusion of the other characters enabled audiences to connect intimately with each character that was in the main and supporting cast. The director made the right decision with their vision and we are all the better for it.