Shortly after Aronofsky was installed as director, the film was given an official title, The Wolverine. Note that that isn’t Wolverine 2, with Aronofsky stressing that the film will not take the shape of a conventional sequel and will stand up on its own merits, completely independently of Origins. “It’s a standalone piece,” he says, “it has nothing to do with anything else in the whole franchise or in that universe.”

Meanwhile, the director seems to be relishing the chance to surprise everybody with his take on the big-budget action movie. “Every time I start a film, everyone’s like ‘what the hell is he doing?’” says Aronofsky to Movie City News, “so hopefully once again I’ll surprise everyone. I want to see if I can do what I do in that world. It’s not like I’m going to change my process. I’m going to be working with the same team, but really trying to do something different. Let’s see what happens.”

One of the aforementioned team will be cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who should be a great asset to the project having already worked on other comic-book adaptations in the form of Cowboys and Aliens and the two Iron Man films.

As for the actual subject material, Aronofsky has spoken of the Japanese element playing a large part in attracting him to the project. “There’s all the samurai elements that are really exciting,” he told SuperHeroHype, before confirming his intention to cast a lot of Japanese actors. “'I’m a big fan of Japanese movies, and we're going to try to have a good time.”

“Chris McQuarrie wrote a great screenplay,” continues Aronofsky. “We're trying to get it into a slightly better place but he's working on it, and I think it'll be easy to fix. Chris is an amazing writer and I'm very lucky to have him as a collaborator

And speaking of collaborators, there’s one rather significant one we haven’t mentioned yet…