Fox just released a new image from Logan (formerly known as Wolverine 3 ) showing Stephen Merchant as the mutant Caliban. Caliban, in the X-Men comics, has the mutant ability to track other mutants, which could explain why he would be so valuable in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Logan.
I’m just going to say, I hate everything about this picture. Stephen Merchant is one of my favorite actors -- Wheatly from Portal 2 is the best robot ever created -- and here he just looks ridiculous. Here are some things Merchant looks like in this Logan snapshot.
One of the aliens from Prometheus decided to pose for National Geographic .
A cocaine fiend who finally got the stash of his dreams.
A child that went swimming in a pool of chalk dust and just got caught.
Two Venus Flytraps eating a pair of eyeballs in a rubber human mask.
A mannequin dowsed in talcum powder.
In his first appearance as part of the scavenging Morlocks, Caliban looks a bit like Merchant's portrayal, but that isn’t the Caliban everyone knows . Shortly after his introduction, Caliban was mutated by Apocalypse to be one of his horsemen, giving him spiky protrusions all over his body. He eventually gained control of himself again and became a member of X-Force, the team of mutants that wasn’t afraid to go where the X-Men wouldn't.
Caliban is an extremely important mutant in the X-Men universe. When the Scarlet Witch lost control of her powers and got rid of 90 percent of the mutants on the planet , Caliban was one of the 198 left. Without him helping out the leftover mutants, the X-gene would have been completely wiped out.
Not to mention that Caliban is already in the X-Men movie universe. In X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, he’s played by Tómas Lemarquis and approached by Apocalypse to help him find his horseman. The X-Men movies have never been good about keeping continuity in their moviesl they pretty much wiped out everything that happened in the original trilogy in X-Men: First Class. Still, it’s going to be quite a stretch to get Caliban to make sense in both movies with two different actors.
I don’t like when Fox messes with my merry Marvel mutants or my favorite actors. Logan pops its claws into theaters on March 3, 2017.
