The most human death of a superhero in all of cinema

Logan gave Wolverine the most human death of a superhero ever… (Then Deadpool was like, “Sike, nah.”)

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There was no mystery going into Logan. Hugh Jackman had been playing Wolverine for seventeen years across ten films (until he’s 90). He had announced publicly that this was it…. (90) The final run. The last time he was putting on the claws. The marketing for the film leaned into it completely: the imagery of an aging, scarred hand holding a child’s hand; the worn-down aesthetic; and the R rating that told you this wasn’t going to be a safe, crowd-pleasing superhero sendoff. Everything about Logan before you even bought your ticket was saying the same thing: this is a story about the end. And then you sit down and watch it.

Within the first ten minutes, the film makes sure you understand exactly what kind of shape Logan is in. He’s older than he should look. He’s drinking to manage pain that his healing factor used to handle automatically. His skeleton, the adamantium that made him nearly indestructible for decades, is now poisoning him from the inside out. The thing that made him a weapon in the first place is slowly killing him.

This portrait of a worn-out, dying Wolverine wasn’t invented for the screen. Logan takes its inspiration from “Old Man Logan,” the acclaimed comic written by Mark Millar and drawn by Steve McNiven that ran through the pages of Wolverine across 2008 and 2009. The comic unfolds in a dystopian future where the supervillains finally won: most of the heroes are dead, the country has been carved up into territories ruled by the people who beat them, and the Red Skull sits in the White House. In it, an aged Logan has sworn off violence completely, living out his days on a farm in a wasteland lorded over by the Hulk’s monstrous descendants, until he’s dragged onto a brutal cross-country road trip alongside a blind, elderly Hawkeye. It is grim, sprawling, and built from the start as a final chapter for the character.

The film keeps almost none of that, and it couldn’t have even if it wanted to, since the rights to Hawkeye, the Hulk, and the rest of the Marvel universe sat with other studios at the time. What Mangold carried over instead was the essence of the thing: a Wolverine who is old, broken, disillusioned, and quietly aching for the death his body keeps refusing him. Stripped of the supervillain spectacle, that one idea turned out to be everything the film actually needed. And there’s a quiet irony buried in it, because the comic that handed Logan its tired, mortal hero never actually killed him off. The page imagined the end of Wolverine; it took the screen to finally let him go.

Director James Mangold doesn’t dress this up. There’s no false hope that Logan is going to find some way to power through. Every scene is another step in the same direction. This is a man running out of time; he’s getting weaker and has lost all the reasons that would keep any man going until Laura gives him one. And that’s what makes the ending so devastatingly effective. Because Logan doesn’t die trying to save the world. He doesn’t go out in some enormous, operatic battle against a world-ending threat. He dies in the woods, in the mud, protecting a group of children from men with guns. It’s as small and as human as a superhero death has ever been. He uses the last of everything he has. And then he simply… stops.

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No slow-motion heroic final pose. Just a man who has been fighting since before most of us were born, finally exhausted enough to let go. Laura is holding his hand. He tells her, “So this is what it feels like. ” And that’s it. Theaters were silent. And then they weren’t, because people were crying. Openly. Without embarrassment. Grown adults who had grown up watching Wolverine be the unkillable, unbreakable, regenerating force of nature, sitting in the dark completely undone by watching him die like a person.

And then Laura turns the cross on his grave into an X. And whatever composure anyone had left was gone. Here’s the thing that makes the anger part of this so interesting: because yes, people were emotional, but there was also this undercurrent of genuine frustration that the film had the nerve to be this final about it. Superheroes exist in a genre built on resurrection and on the implicit promise that no ending is really an ending. We have been trained by decades of comic book storytelling to understand that death is a revolving door. But hey, that’s why there’s a multiverse. And Deadpool made that abundantly clear.

Logan current U.S. availability is mainly through digital subscription from Disney Plus, rental or purchase through services such as YouTube, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Apple TV.

Where to read Old Man Logan:
If Logan made you curious about the comic that helped inspire it, the original Old Man Logan story is collected in Wolverine Old Man Logan by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven. Digital readers can check Marvel.com, and Amazon for physical copies.