Rumors have been bubbling up about Wolverine 3 but very little has been confirmed outright, even after the film is seemingly all done. It seems pretty clear that the film will follow the Old Man Logan storyline in some way, though I can't imagine that it will be beat-for-beat what's in that particular line of comics. It's also looking pretty certain that this will be the last time that we will see Patrick Stewart's glorious dome in the guise of Professor X, leaving the throne to James McAvoy and his no-less-glorious bald head.
Another major rumor that's been floating around is who, exactly, Wolverine will face off with in the new movie. Nerdist News had a story a few months ago that suggested that Logan would be facing off with the Reavers, a group of cyborn mercenaries as well as their creator, Donald Pierce, a member of the notorious Hellfire Club. Boyd Holbrook has been confirmed as being a villain, described as the head of security for a global corporation on the lookout for Wolverine, while Richard E. Grant is playing some kind of mad scientist, who could indeed be Pierce.
A little more light was shown on all this hypothesizing today when Cinemablend confirmed that in the audio commentary for X-Men: Apocalypse, director Bryan Singer says that Nathaniel Essex will be a villain in Wolverine 3. For those not familiar with the comics, Nathaniel Essex also goes by the name Mister Sinister, and he's about as powerful a villain as the X-Men ever faced next to Apocalypse. In the comics, Sinister is capable of damn near anything and has a deep-seated disgust with anything or anyone who is not up to his might. Singer pointed at a post-credits sequence in X-Men: Apocalypse where the name Essex Corp. can be seen on a briefcase, and then went on to say that Essex Corp. and Nathaniel will be incorporated into Wolverine 3.
So, is the global corporation Essex Corp. then? It seems very likely, but there's no clear way of knowing if Holbrook will be playing Mister Sinister or if a yet-to-be-revealed actor will be playing the character. Regardless, this is humongous news for fans of the source material and makes the impatience to get more information about the third movie all the more intense.
