Director James Mangold has stepped into the world of big-budget tentpole IPs with The Wolverine, Logan, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but he only ever walked that line sparingly, so to speak.
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Other than the chaos of Dial’s production and script, it can be said Mangold stepped back from the multiversal craziness brought about by Marvel and DC movies in hopes they’d keep things cooking.
Deadpool & Wolverine is a product of that and picks up where his story ended, but it’s not his movie and not something he would’ve signed off on according to his remarks in Rolling Stone that come to us via MovieMaker.
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“It’s weird that I’ve even worked in the world of IP entertainment because I don’t like multi-movie universe-building,” he said. “I think it’s the enemy of storytelling. The death of storytelling. It’s more interesting to people the way the Legos connect than the way the story works in front of us.”
Concerning his creative approach, Mangold added, “For me, the goal becomes, always, ‘What is unique about this film, and these characters?’ Not making you think about some other movie or some Easter egg or something else, which is all an intellectual act, not an emotional act. You want the movie to work on an emotional level.”
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Part of what sparked the Multiverse conversation with the director in his RS interview was the return of Johnny Cash as a character in his next film, A Complete Unknown starring Timothee Chalamet.
Mangold previously directed Joaquin Phoenix in the Cash biopic Walk The Line, but Phoenix won’t play Cash again in some sort of crossover due to his age. Instead, Bikeriders and The Predator star Boyd Holbrook is portraying the Man In Black as a figure in the life of Bob Dylan (Chalamet).
“I think when you see the movie, Boyd is fantastic and you don’t think about it for a second. It’s just, Oh, there’s Johnny Cash and he’s in Bob’s life,” Mangold explained. “I love Joaquin, but he’s not 30, or whatever Johnny was at this moment. They’re both young people [at] that moment in life.”