If you haven’t seen Logan, turn back now. Seriously. Major spoilers about the ending are discussed below.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Okay, so yeah, Wolverine is dead. Hugh Jackman announced quite a while ago that Logan would be his final turn as the X-Men character he’s been playing since 2000, but that announcement was met with some skepticism as he’s flirted with stepping back before only to suit up again for films like X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Wolverine. But after seeing Logan, fans now understand that definitively this is the end for Jackman’s Wolverine. He’s now six feet under.

The Logan we meet in Logan is already pretty under the weather, harboring a nasty cough throughout the film and struggling with the fact that he’s no longer healing as quickly or as well as he used to. Why? Well it’s not explicitly explained—at one point in the film Laura takes Logan to a doctor who says there’s something inside him making him unwell, but Logan is uninterested in finding out for sure what it is, let alone curing it. He's watched a lot of his friends die, so at this point he figures he doesn't really deserve to live much longer. In fact, if Charles didn't depend on his care, he probably would have killed himself by this point.

Logan does tell Laura that he has a feeling it’s the adamantium that’s poisoning his body, given that it’s been in there for quite a while already. So that could be what aids in Logan’s downfall, but his actual death comes at the hands of himself, kind of.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

As part of the Transigen project, Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) and Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) have moved on from trying to raise and control new young mutants from birth, and instead have crafted a total killing machine in X-24, their 24th attempt at creating a mutant of their own. X-24 is played by a younger looking Jackman—a rage-filled, morally bankrupt, mute weapon of immense strength and healing factor. In order to save Laura and the other younger mutants, Logan sacrifices himself fighting the much stronger X-24, only to be impaled on a piece of wood by the mutant creation just before Laura puts an adamantium bullet into X-24’s head, killing him once and for all.

So how did this ending come about? Was the plan to actually kill Logan all along? Collider’s own Steve Weintraub recently spoke with director James Mangold about the ending in a spoiler-filled interview, and he confirmed that yes, he came up with the idea of killing Wolverine in the months after making The Wolverine. As for why his death comes at the hands of X-24, Mangold said it was about subverting the expectations of yet another big superhero battle in the third act:

“Well it seemed to me that it had to in some way be a battle with something other than just one of the array of supervillains. What I liked about the idea on a thematic level of battling X-24 and even dying at his hands was that effectively there’s a kind of radian analysis you can make of it all, which is really interesting, which is that he’s effectively a guy who’s gone through 200 years with this burden of shame and guilt and regret, remorse, anger about the violence he’s been forced to and willingly committed in his life, about feeling that he’s been cursed that he can never feel love or sell it because those he connects to die. To put his last fight against his own self in a sense, a mirror, a kind of dark mirror—in a way, X-24 in my mind was designed to be a vision of Weapon X, that he’s essentially battling his worst self, and younger, more capable, more savage, and without any sense of conscience or morality. There were several different interesting aspects to me, one is when that part of him, if you look at it for a moment from a psychological point of view, when that mirror image of him dies, it’s very interesting how that becomes in the last minute of the film that he’s alive, the moment where it’s almost like something’s been lifted from him. And of the many things I’m proud about the movie, I’m really proud about the way—I don’t expect you to intellectually engage that, but I expect you to feel it. I do think you feel that in the wake of that battle when he turns and Laura kneels beside him, that he is suddenly capable and something has gone away inside him and he’s capable of connecting with her and saying things that the guy who has run through the previous 121 minutes of this movie could not have said, until this point.”

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Image via 20th Century Fox

As for where the line, “So this is what it feels like” comes from, Mangold gives the credit to his co-writer Scott Frank:

“Scott Frank [wrote that line]. We were trading the script back and forth between NY and LA and he wrote that line and sent it to me. Oh my God, I loved it, I knew those were the final words the second I read it, and to me it has two wonderful meanings and Hugh brilliantly plays both of them, one being for a man who has died 450 times in movies, let alone in his career, and yet never dies because of his healing factor, he has no idea, it’s like a tunnel he goes into and never comes out the other side, so there was that very literal meaning in relation to death. But there was also this moment of him holding his daughter’s hand and seeing utter emotion in her eyes and feeling the purest kind of love which is family love, and letting it in for the first time in his life.”

And while the film certainly provides an emotional conclusion for The Wolverine, it really is an origin story of sorts for Laura—a character whose journey Mangold is definitely interested in exploring further in future films.

So yeah, that’s how the ending of Logan came about. I think it’s a pretty perfect way to leave this character who’s been through so much, and while it may have been a bit more effective if there had been less missteps along the way—if Wolverine’s emotional arc was more satisfying as a whole across the entire X-Men franchise—I think Mangold, Frank, and Jackman did a terrific job of focusing on what mattered the most: the character at hand.

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Image via 20th Century Fox
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Image via 20th Century Fox
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Image via 20th Century Fox

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