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Sony’s New Wolverine Game Is a Weird Violent Echo of the Past
This week, years after first announcing their high-budget Wolverine game (and also a long while after a studio leak of some development assets), Sony and Insomniac finally released a proper trailer.
I’m now supposed to get all hyped up about it and share my reactions and my excitement with you as a 41-year-old dude who sometimes loves Marvel things, but instead…I keep thinking about a game from 2009.
Back then, Marvel wasn’t the massive media empire it is today, but a different slightly smaller media empire not quite yet owned by Disney. Its film division was in a weird war with itself, having sold off the rights to certain characters years earlier to Fox. This bifurcated movie universe has since come back together, but for many years Fox was over there making their own films with their own continuities, mostly centered around the X-Men and the steely charisma of one Hugh Jackman.
One such film was 2009’s thoroughly middling X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a movie that’s astoundingly forgettable even though it did technically introduce Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. Looking back at it now, it’s kind of amazing that it didn’t kill the franchise entirely. It’s far more frustrating and less fun to watch than even the worst of the studio’s current output, in my opinion.
