Making sense of the X-Men timeline can be complicated, but when you focus just on Wolverine,
the story gets a little easier to follow.
From his bloody origin tale to his fateful final movie, here’s Wolverine’s cinematic
story explained.
The first chronological glimpse we get of the boy who grows up to become Wolverine is
in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, where we learn that his name isn't Logan at all.
It's James Howlett.
Logan is actually the surname of the man who murders James' father in 1845, which causes
James' mutation to activate, pushing bone claws out from between his knuckles.
Enraged, James kills Logan, only to almost immediately learn that the man was actually
his biological father.
Young James flees his home along with his half-brother, Victor Creed, who possesses
the same mutant healing ability as James.
That healing factor not only makes the boys practically impossible to kill, but also slows
their aging, keeping them looking relatively youthful as they fight side by side through
every major war over the next hundred years.
In 2013's The Wolverine, we see that he spent some of this time in a Japanese POW camp in
1945.
While he's there, James saves the life of Japanese officer Ichirō Yashida from the
bombing of Nagasaki, an event which will prove important many years later.
In X-Men: First Class, Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, soon to be known as Professor
X and Magneto, find themselves up against Nazi mutant Sebastian Shaw and his team of
superpowered henchmen.
Realizing they'll need some help to bring Shaw down, the duo uses Cerebro to find new
mutants and form a team of their own, so in a zippy montage set in 1962, they recruit
a handful of young mutants who wind up as the, well, first class of X-Men.
Not everyone is eager to join up, though.
When Erik and Charles walk into a bar, a cigar-smoking James Howlett tells them that he's not interested,
using some language that insured the movie would be a hard PG-13.
While fighting together in the Vietnam War, an increasingly violent Victor assaults a
woman, and then kills the officer who tries to intervene.
James rushes to his brother's aid without realizing what he's done, and both are sentenced
to die by firing squad.
Needless to say, the execution doesn't go according to plan.
Their miraculous survival catches the eye of Major William Stryker, and Victor and James
are recruited to his black ops team of mutants, Team X, which also includes a version of Wade
Wilson, better known as Deadpool, that we all do our best to just not talk about.
"Hey!
It's me!
Don't scratch!"
It's at this point that James starts going by the alias Logan, after the father he killed
so many decades before.
Logan and Victor work with Team X for several years, but ultimately, Logan decides he can
no longer stomach the team's callous disdain for human life.
He quits Team X, but Victor decides to stay, and the two part ways.
Six years after walking away from Team X, Logan is working as a lumberjack in the Canadian
Rockies, but is pulled back into Stryker's world after Victor murders Logan's girlfriend,
Kayla Silverfox.
Stryker tells him Victor has gone rogue, and he asks Logan to join the Weapon X program,
giving him a chance to get his revenge on Victor by undergoing an experimental procedure
that will fuse an unbreakable metal called adamantium to his skeleton.
Wolverine agrees, after requesting new dog tags with the alias "Wolverine."
Thanks to the healing factor that allows him to survive, the procedure is a success.
Stryker, never intended to let Logan go free once it was completed, but Logan manages to
escape.
When he learns that Victor is kidnapping young mutants for Stryker, Logan returns to free
them and get his revenge.
The young mutants are flown to safety by Charles Xavier while Logan and Victor fight, first
against each other, then together against Deadpool.
Once Wade is defeated, Victor leaves, but before Logan can get out, Stryker shoots him
in the head with an adamantium bullet.
Logan survives, but when he regains consciousness, he can't remember his past.
Set in the year 2003, X-Men reveals Logan living as a cage fighter in Canada, still
missing most of his memories but using the alias "Wolverine" thanks to the dog tags he
got from Weapon X.
He meets young mutant runaway Rogue, and they're attacked on the road by Victor, who's now
called Sabretooth.
Curiously, neither brother seems to have any memory of the other, and unlike Wolverine,
Sabretooth looks like a completely different person now.
While Sabretooth has the upper hand, Wolverine and Rogue are rescued by Storm and Cyclops
and taken to Charles Xavier's mansion, where they join the X-Men.
Together with the X-Men, Wolverine fights Magneto and his Brotherhood of Mutants.
The bad guys want to use Rogue's abilities to power a device that will turn baseline
humans into mutants, in response to a proposed law that would require mutants to register
with the government.
The X-Men manage to foil Magneto's plot, overcoming both the Brotherhood and some pretty rough
dialogue.
"Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning?...The same thing that
happens to everything else."
The X-Men's victory leads to Magneto's imprisonment, but the tension between mutants and humans
remains.
Occuring not long after the events of X-Men, X2: X-Men United opens with a mutant assassination
attempt on the president of the United States, causing relations between mutants and the
U.S. government to become rockier than ever.
William Stryker, now much older than the last time we saw him, receives permission from
the president to investigate Xavier, but it's really a ruse so that Stryker can force Xavier
to use Cerebro to destroy all mutants.
The X-Men travel to Stryker's base underneath an abandoned military installation, and when
Logan enters the room where he received his adamantium skeleton, some of his memories
return.
He attacks Stryker, demanding to know why the military man did this to him, and he's
shocked when Stryker reveals that Logan volunteered for the Weapon X program.
Logan refrains from killing his old foe, but Stryker ultimately meets his end when a nearby
dam bursts, drowning him.
Meanwhile, the X-Men have managed to overcome both Stryker's people and Magneto, who tried
to double cross them.
In the process, their plane is damaged, leading Jean Grey, with whom Logan has fallen in love,
to telekinetically lift the plane to safety while holding back the lake.
Once her team is safe, she gets swept away by the rushing water.
At the beginning of X-Men: The Last Stand, set in 2006, Cyclops goes to visit what he
thinks is Jean's final resting place.
But she's not dead.
Naturally, he's overjoyed to learn that she's still alive, but his delight is short-lived
when Jean unceremoniously kills him.
Xavier sends Logan and Storm to investigate, and they're horrified to learn that Jean has
been taken over by a destructive power called the Phoenix.
Meanwhile, a so-called "cure" for mutants has been discovered, and Magneto rebuilds
his Brotherhood of Mutants to oppose it.
Feeling betrayed by Xavier, who suppressed the Phoenix when she was a child, Jean kills
her mentor and joins with Magneto, but don't worry.
Xavier is only mostly dead.
Magneto and the Brotherhood attack the lab where the cure is held, but during the battle,
Jean loses control of the Phoenix and begins indiscriminately destroying everything around
her.
Thanks to his healing ability, Logan is the only one who's able to get close to Jean.
In a moment of lucidity, she asks Logan to save her, and he claws into her chest, killing
her and ending the destruction.
"I love you."
Set in 2013, The Wolverine finds Logan back in the Canadian wilderness, still agonizing
over killing Jean, when he's contacted on behalf of Ichirō Yashida, the man he saved
back in 1945.
The message is delivered by Yukio, a mutant who has the ability to foresee people's deaths,
and who has had a vision about Wolverine.
"I see you on your back.
There's blood everywhere.
You're holding your own heart in your hand."
While in Japan, Logan realizes that Yashida didn't ask him there to say farewell.
Instead, he wants to steal Logan's immortality and live forever.
Logan loses his adamantium claws battling Yashida, but he manages to defeat him using
his regenerated bone claws.
After the fight, Logan leaves Japan, accompanied by Yukio.
In a mid-credits scene set two years later, Magneto and a very-much-alive Charles Xavier
approach Logan in an airport to tell him of a new threat to wipe out all mutants.
X-Men: Days of Future Past opens in the year 2023, when mutants have been driven to near-extinction
by the robotic Sentinels.
Along with Xavier, Storm, and Magneto, Logan; who miraculously has his adamantium claws
back; has managed to elude the Sentinels long enough to form a plan.
With the future already beyond repair, they decide to use Kitty Pryde's mutant ability
to send Logan's consciousness back to 1973 to stop the events that led to the creation
of the Sentinels in the first place, kind of like in the first Terminator.
They hope that, if he's successful, the timeline will reset, placing them all in an alternate
version of 2023.
Using his 1973 body piloted by his 2023 consciousness, Logan joins forces with the younger Xavier
and his X-Men to prevent the assassination that paves the way for the Sentinel program.
Although Logan succeeds in his mission, he's horribly injured in the process, with his
mangled body sinking to the bottom of the Potomac River.
However, Logan's 2023 consciousness doesn't stick around long enough to learn how he survives.
As soon as he changes the future, he returns to an alternate 2023.
In this new timeline, Logan is now a teacher in Xavier's school, where many of the X-Men
who'd died in the primary timeline are now alive again, including Jean Grey.
After completing his mission in Days of Future Past, Logan's maimed body is recovered by
a team led by a person who appears to be Stryker, but is revealed to be Mystique.
In X-Men: Apocalypse, it seems that Logan somehow wound up back under the real Stryker's
control anyway.
In yet another new timeline, he never escaped the Weapon X program after gaining his adamantium
skeleton in 1979.
The X-Men come upon this alternate version of Logan, who's still being called Weapon
X and has no memory of his true identity, when they infiltrate Stryker's facility in
1983.
After Wolverine slaughters many of Stryker's soldiers, Jean Grey manages to restore some
of his memories.
Logan runs out into the cold, and Cyclops speculates that they'll never see him again.
Presumably, Jean's intervention paves the way for Logan to still join the X-Men at some
point down the road, leading to the happy timeline we saw in Days of Future Past.
Or maybe not.
The Wolverine we meet in Logan is a much older, more beaten-down version of the character
than moviegoers had seen before.
After living for nearly two centuries, Logan's healing ability is finally beginning to fail,
and he's growing increasingly ill from adamantium poisoning.
This future version of Logan is working as a limo driver and caring for an ailing Charles
Xavier, and he carries around an adamantium bullet, pondering the possibility of ending
his own life.
Despite the happy future Logan returned to at the end of Days of Future Past, we learn
that most mutants, including the X-Men, have been wiped out anyway.
It wasn't the government this time, though: A few years before the start of the film,
Xavier lost control of his powers and inadvertently killed the rest of the X-Men, a fact which
Logan remembers, but Charles has mercifully forgotten.
"I did something…something unspeakable."
In 2029, Logan encounters a young girl named Laura whose powers mirror his own.
This kid is determined to get to a mutant sanctuary in North Dakota called Eden.
Charles persuades Logan to take her there, and the three embark on the journey together.
Along the way, they learn that Laura was created using Logan's DNA as part of the villainous
Transigen program.
Unfortunately, that DNA was also used to create X24, a vicious clone that looks exactly like
Logan did in his prime.
Before they can reach Eden, X24 kills Charles, but Logan and Laura manage to escape.
Laura convinces Logan to continue onto Eden, and when they get there, they find the other
mutant children who've escaped Transigen.
Laura and the kids make plans to escape into Canada, but before they can, they're attacked
by Transigen soldiers and X24.
The children defeat the soldiers, but Logan is no match for his new and improved clone,
who impales him on a fallen tree.
Before X24 can finish him off, Laura shoots him in the head with Logan's adamantium bullet.
Logan dies holding Laura's hand, metaphorically fulfilling Yukio's vision that he would die
with "his heart in his hand."
Laura and the other mutant children escape to Canada, leaving behind Wolverine's grave,
which is marked with an "X."
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