It looks like after many delays the ball is finally rolling for The Wolverine, the sequel which Darren Aronofsky was originally going to direct but is now being helmed by Knight and Day director James Mangold. Yesterday, casting for five of the characters in the film were unveiled via ComingSoon.net and Variety and they show some promise.
The big piece of news was that actor Will Yun Lee would be playing the main villain in the film, Kenuichio Harada aka The Silver Samurai, opposite Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. This is amazing news since Lee is a very talented actor and has the chops and skill to pull off a role like this. My only issue is that Lee is of Korean decent, not Japanese, which will probably make a lot of Asians angry and feel a little less authentic to everyone else that notices.
The other casting announcements include Hiroyuki Sanada, who is set to play Shingen, Hal Yamanouchi ,who will play Yashida, and relative newcomers in Japan Tao Okamoto, who will play Shingen’s daughter and Wolverine’s love interest Mariko, and Rila Fukushima who is set to play Yukio, a ninja assassin hired to kill Wolverine. It’s nice to know the studio is hiring a handful of popular locals to star in a film that’s based in Japan, so they all get my stamp of approval.
The plot details have been kept under wraps but we do know that the film will follow the early comic arc written by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller and that we should expect some serious ass-kicking when our main characters clash for the first time.
The Wolverine is set for a July 26, 2013 release
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