The Main Vein: First Image From The Wolverine

With this past summer’s excitement over The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, combined with its mild anticipation of The Amazing Spider-Man and what has turned out to be its complete and utter apathy over Dredd 3D, it’s easy to forget that there are other comic book movies in the pipeline. Sure, we’ve got Iron Man 3, but let’s not forget that the sequel to 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, titled counterintuitively as The Wolverine for some reason, is supposedly in production.

Sure, it’s easy to forget about the old Canucklehead, given that in his last cinematic outing, he met Will.I.Am and allowed him to live, and spent time fighting the only version of Deadpool, The Merc With The Mouth, that nobody wanted – namely, one with no fucking mouth. But this time around, he’s got a new director – no more weirdness from the guy who played “German Champion” in Kickboxer 5, now we have the dude who played Dr. Gold in The Sweetest Thing! Wait, what? *

Regardless, Marvel certainly doesn’t want people to forget that there’s a new Wolverine movie coming out, so earlier today, they released the first image of Hugh Jackman, wearing the claws and about thirty pounds of hair product:

Click to simultaneously make Hugh look larger and, by extension, you look smaller!

Wow. Jesus, Hugh’s really let himself go, huh?

Actually, in all seriousness: no human males should look like that. It makes the rest of us look bad, and some of us just don’t need to be contrasted to… that. And what the hell is up with those veins? If you black out everything in that image other than Hugh’s left arm, you wouldn’t know if this was a teaser for a Wolverine movie or Dirk Diggler’s lost Brock Landers film.

Regardless, the latest Wolverine film adventure and excuse for your girlfriend to look askance at you is scheduled for release on July 26th.

*Actually, James Mangold also directed Copland and 3:10 To Yuma, so it’s not as dire as it seems… however, he also directed Girl, Interrupted, so be prepared for Wolverine to possibly dance unironically to old Motown hits with a surrogate sister and learn something about his femininity. Hey, it could happen.

(Via Marvel)