Logan Scenes You Didn't See In Theaters
After Deadpool proved an R-rated X-Men movie could be a hit, director James Mangold was given a good bit of freedom to tell the story he wanted to tell with Logan—but that doesn't mean there weren't a few ideas that wound up on the cutting room floor. Mangold, as well as others involved with the project, have pulled back the curtain on some of the scenes and ideas that didn't make the cut in the version of the film that fans have been raving about. Here's a look at the Logan scenes you didn't see in theaters.
Alternate farm house dinner
Logan, Laura and Xavier are framed as a makeshift family, and that was never more obvious than when the three joined a regular family at their farmhouse for dinner. It's one of the most human moments in the film, but that wasn't the first cut of that sweet moment. The final version is more ad-libbed and natural from the cast, though Mangold told Collider there's actually a different version of the scene that will likely be included in the Blu-ray release. "[It was] another whole direction I took for the actors in that sequence, they produced a whole other wonderful scene," he explained. "You just had to choose between them because they were redundant, but it was another miraculous scene that kind of grew between them."
The flashback to the Westchester, N.Y. event
One of the big mysteries surrounding Logan was the Westchester, New York event only referenced in vague passing. We can glean that it involved Professor Xavier losing control of his psychic abilities (as we see happen a few times in Logan to terrifying results), and thanks to a radio broadcast, we catch that it killed a handful of people—apparently including some of the X-Men—though it's never fully explained. In the original draft of the script, there was actually a full-on flashback to the mystery event, but screenwriter Michael Green said it held more weight by not being fully explained. "I've found the experience of watching it is far more poignant to just know that it was something really regrettable and it was bad and most likely, friends were lost," Green told the Hollywood Reporter. "Or maybe it was people we didn't know."
Additional road trip scenes
Mangold famously descried Logan as an "extremely bloody Little Miss Sunshine." In fact, he's said the original draft of the script pushed that road trip motif a bit too far. Logan is already a leisurely-paced superhero story, but it originally had even more character-based moments on the road. Mangold told Collider: "[A] couple of different moments that were on the road in the journey where I think you can tell I'm playing with the very limits of what I—there's a certain pace anticipation with tentpole movies and I think I'm playing at the very outer edge of a very adult, serious movie pace where I have no hesitation and did in delivering kind of high octane action sequences."
The early X-23/Logan banter
For a while there, it seemed like we might never get to hear Laura (Dafne Keen) speak—until she finally let the audience (and poor Logan) hear her voice when she started screaming at Wolverine in a mix of Spanish and English. In the early versions of the script, Laura actually spoke a lot earlier. Mangold said they came to realize that it created too much "snappy banter" from the start, and it didn't give the relationship time to naturally develop, so they decided to delay the reveal—then make her speak Spanish, to insert a language barrier as Logan and Laura are getting to know one another. "So then suddenly Scott was like, 'Why don't we just make her half-Mexican, a Hispanic kid, so even when she starts to talk, you're still going to have two people who can't completely understand each other all the time?" he told Den of Geek. "In a sense, I think that's what makes the relationship so charming and at the same time it doesn't seem so cute. You [don't] just go into suddenly standard sassy, precocious child dialogue."
There is no extended cut
Unlike most movies, Mangold said there's no mythical director's cut floating around out there for Logan. The movie fans saw in theaters is the final version, though there may be a few extra scenes that wind up on a Blu-ray deleted scenes collection. "[T]his movie is my cut," he told Collider. "There's a reason you keep reading people like Hugh and myself and producers of the film talking about what a remarkable experience this has been with Fox."