LoganSave

It's 2029. Mutants have been all but extinct for nearly a decade — a quiet, off-screen genocide engineered through corn syrup. Logan, the Wolverine, is now a chauffeur. He drives a limo for drunk businessmen along the Texas-Mexico border, hides during the day in an abandoned smelting plant, and at night nurses Charles Xavier — Professor X, now in his nineties, suffering from a degenerative brain condition that triggers psychic seizures capable of paralyzing everyone within a mile. The seizures are also the reason the X-Men are dead. The mansion incident. The thing the world calls a tragedy. The thing the film never quite explains.

Logan is also dying. The adamantium that makes his bones unbreakable has been slowly poisoning him for decades. His healing factor is failing. His claws stick coming out. His memory is starting to slip. He's saving every dollar he makes driving the limo because he and Charles need to buy a boat — a sun-bleached sailboat called The Sunseeker — and disappear into the Pacific. Just the two of them. A retirement nobody is owed.

A woman named Gabriela tracks Logan down. She has a daughter — Laura, around eleven years old, silent, fierce — and she needs Logan to drive them to North Dakota, to a place called Eden. Logan refuses. By the time he reconsiders, Gabriela has been murdered. Laura is alone in the back of his car. And Donald Pierce — a cybernetically-enhanced soldier working for a corporate entity called Transigen — has come to collect her. Logan tries to drive her away. Pierce's men corner them at the smelting plant. Logan and the adult-bodied, claw-out Laura cut through them together.

Laura is Logan's daughter. Or his clone. Or his genetic patient. The film never quite settles on the language. What's clear is that Transigen has been growing mutant children from harvested X-Men DNA for use as weapons — and Laura was the prototype X-23. She has Logan's bone claws, his healing factor, and his Yorkshire stubbornness. The reason Transigen wants her back is that the experiment has been deemed unsuccessful; she has too much will of her own. Pierce intends to terminate her.

Logan, Charles, and Laura escape to Oklahoma City. A horse trailer overturns on the highway. Logan helps the family right it. They invite him home for dinner — a Black farming family named the Munsons, parents and a son. For one quiet evening, around their kitchen table, Logan and Charles look like a real grandfather and grandson. They sleep that night in the Munsons' guest room. And then Transigen's reinforcements arrive — including X-24, a younger, soulless, fully-revitalized clone of Logan, used by Transigen as a kill-team weapon. X-24 murders the Munson family. He kills Charles Xavier with a single thrust through the chest. Logan and Laura barely escape with the wagon.

Logan, who has cared for Charles for years, buries him in a shallow grave by a roadside lake. Charles's last words confirm the mansion incident: 'I know what I did.' Logan doesn't say anything. He drives Laura north. They find Eden — a temporary camp of escaped child-mutants, the rest of Transigen's experiment, all under twelve. The kids plan to cross the Canadian border to safety. Logan, badly hurt, dosed with an experimental serum, joins them for the final push.

The final battle is in a forest near the Canadian border. Pierce's mercenaries close in. Logan and the mutant children fight back. Logan kills X-24 with an adamantium bullet his father has been saving for his own suicide. He saves the kids. He collapses in Laura's arms in a forest clearing. The fight is over. The dying takes a few minutes. Laura watches him slip. He looks up at her and says: 'So this is what it feels like.'

Logan grossed $619 million globally on a $97 million budget — the highest-grossing R-rated film at the time. It received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, the first X-Men film to be nominated for a major Academy Award. James Mangold's screenplay, co-written with Scott Frank and Michael Green, was structured as a Western — explicit references to Shane (1953), which Charles watches with the Munson kids the night before he dies. Hugh Jackman retired from the role with this performance. He returned, seven years later, only for Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) — a film he agreed to specifically because it canonically takes place before Logan, leaving this ending intact.