Many thought it was a strange choice for Darren Aronofsky to decide to make the follow-up to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s known for fairly idiosyncratic movies, so directing a studio sequel to a film that was poorly recieved seemed an unexpected move – especially with his critical stock currently riding high with Black Swank – however now the director has been talking to HitFix, and it seems the way he’s rationalised it, is to basically pretend the first film didn’t happen.
There won’t be plot disparities between the movies, but HitFix says Aronofsky is keen to stress this movie is a one-off story, and emphasises that the film isn’t a sequel in any conventional success – suggesting that other than featuring Wolverine himself, it’ll stand apart from everything else X-Men we’ve seen.
The director also says the movie will be known as The Wolverine, with nothing in the title to say it’s a sequel, once more separating itself from the first film, and suggesting it’s almost as much a reboot as anything else, and that Fox are giving Aronofsky room to put his own print on it. This is much the way comics have worked, with new writers and illustrators bringing their own ideas and twists, so there’s no reason it can’t work on film.
That said, I’d assume Fox will want to ensure that while the movie will be very different from previous X-Men tales, it won’t break with the established canon too much, and will instead be a Wolverine story that just happened separately to everything else we’ve seen.