While Logan wasn't the wild "Old Man Logan" adaptation many fans hoped for or expected, there's no denying that it was an emotional, powerful send-off for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine.
The 2017 movie saw the actor bid a final farewell to the clawed mutant...only for Ryan Reynolds to convince him to suit up in this summer's Deadpool & Wolverine. However, a concern from the start was how that team-up would potentially tarnish what Logan did so brilliantly seven years ago.
Talking on the Assembled: The Making of Deadpool & Wolverine documentary which hit Disney+ earlier this week, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige revealed how Logan influenced the end of Robert Downey Jr.'s time as Iron Man in 2019's Avengers: Endgame.
"I had always been very vocal with Hugh that he had one of the best endings of any fictional character ever," Feige explained. "And I told him that is so amazing, what he was able to accomplish in Logan."
"That's what we were striving for with Robert Downey Jr. in Endgame, is to give this incredible, iconic fictional character an amazing ending," he added.
Tony Stark's death was every bit as memorable as Wolverine's, with both of their respective endings bringing a tear to the eye of even the most hard-hearted comic book movie fan.
Earlier this year, Feige addressed the importance of preserving Logan's legacy with Deadpool & Wolverine.
"Well, that was something we had talked about many, many years ago," he said. "One of the earliest conversations I had with Hugh Jackman after the acquisition of Fox by Disney was that Logan is one of the greatest stories ever — we can’t undo that. We can’t touch that, and we didn’t for many years."
"When the idea came about, and when the storyline [for Deadpool & Wolverine] came about, and when Hugh reached out to Ryan Reynolds in what is now a momentous moment, I believe, in certainly Marvel history and maybe movie history, it was still all about asking, 'Okay, how do we do this in a way that doesn’t, as you say, negate the amazing drama and emotion of Logan?'"
Feige continued, "The timing was just right because the multiverse is something we had already established and set up, and the Time Variance Authority was right there to help us navigate those waters in a way that allowed Deadpool to go search for a version of Wolverine that wasn’t dead in the ground. I think that [right from the beginning of the movie], we run straight at that."
What he's referring to there is the fact Wade Wilson digs up Logan's corpse and proceeds to use his skeleton and claws to brutally lay waste to the TVA's agents (set to NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye").
No one seemed particularly offended by that, and Deadpool & Wolverine's titular Variant ended up being a completely different version of the X-Man...albeit similar enough to not disappoint X-Men franchise fans.
Avengers: Endgame and Logan are now streaming on Disney+.