After a recent viewing marathon of X-men and Wolverine movies at my house a question occurred to me:
Is Wolverine’s extreme age (he was born sometime in the 19th Century, perhaps as early as the 1840’s, meaning he may be 170 or more years old by present day) common knowledge in any continuity. Meaning, if someone casually asks his age and he says 167 or whatever they don’t even blink, or his government-issued ID states his correct and true birthdate? If not the general public, would it be known to a fair number of government and/or mercenary types?
In the movie Logan it seems that mutants are a known thing to the public (even if currently believed largely extinct). Would Stryker and the Weapon X program know his true age? What about Alpha Flight? Nick Fury and SHIELD?
Of course, any government Wolverine/Logan/James Howlett works for can simply give him a set of ID documents stating whatever age he apparently is, but I’m just curious if his age remains mysterious to practically everyone, is known by some, or known by many and just accepted as-is.
Feel free to add in the comic book and animated stuff - I haven’t been a regular reader of comics since the 1980’s so maybe the answers are there and I just haven’t seen them.
He was a super-healing mutant back then, in some continuities he also had bone claws - in all cases the adamantium skeleton thing came later, probably in the '60’s or 70’s but I’m not entirely sure that was ever specified. So he was already 90-100 years old at the time that was done to him.
The timeline of the movies are full of contradictions. But it seems to have been established in Days of Future Past that Wolverine still had his original skeleton in 1973. He got his adamantium skeleton in 1979 in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
But Logan changed the timeline when he went back to 1973. So how did he get his adamantium skeleton in 1979?
The events in the movie The Wolverine happened just before Days of Future Past. In The Wolverine, the adamantium was stripped from his body, leaving him with just the bone claws.
Now, how that was affected by the change in the timeline in 1973, I dunno.
In Age of Apocalypse, which takes place in 1983, Wolverine is freed from imprisonment in a military facility; presumably he’d been given the adamantium skeleton at some point during his imprisonment (between 1973 and 1983) (this is after the timeline change)
In the comics, it’s possible SHIELD knows everything about him cause they know everything. The only kind of ID he would have his some Canadian special agent thing or a fake license for if he gets pulled over.
It was just his claws that lost the Adamantium in The Wolverine (the Silver Samurai cut off his claws, using a heated Adamantium blade (waves hands LOOK OVER THERE! AN EXPLANATION AS TO HOW THAT WOULD WORK!), as part of attempting to steal his healing factor, then the claws grew back).
And apparently DoFP either prevented The Wolverine from happening, or changed the sequence of events some*, since he has the coated claws in Logan.
The resulting 21st century shown at the end of DoFP had only minor differences from the original continuity, including featuring characters not born until after the timeline was changed, so the changes couldn’t have been that severe. So something LIKE The Wolverine likely happened, especially since many of the key events took place before the timeline change, but, again, it clearly didn’t happen quite the same way it did in the original timeline.
I just saw both The Wolverine and Logan on a flight to Scotland. I have not seen any of the other X-Men movies except the first and second. Did something happen in Last Stand or First Class that restored Logan’s lost memories? If not, why does he remember someone he met in WWII? That kind of bugged me the whole movie.
In the real world… But this is a world with powerful psychics, and they’ve done a lot of work with him to help him restore much of his lost memory. Prof. X, specifically, unleashed a whole lot of hidden memories…some of which Wolvie might even have preferred not to regain.
I was picturing it more like: The Wolverine gets up to use the lavatory, and Logan comes back and sits in his seat. Then Logan gets up and inexplicably the seat is claimed by some random dude with an eyepatch, muttering something about how if the pilot doesn’t pick up the pace he’s going to miss his connection to Madripoor.
