Director James Mangold of ‘Walk The Line,’ ‘Knight and Day’ and ’3:10 To Yuma’ is certainly a director of a better caliber to have on a Wolverine movie. Not to knock Gavin Hood any more than ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ should be knocked, but Hood just plain didn’t have enough of a track record to not get pushed around by studio executives (though I’m still cautiously optimistic for Ender’s Game because I emotionally have to be).

Imagine my dismay when I heard Jessica Biel might be up for the part of Viper…The Madame Hydra Viper, I think – because that is the one that married Wolverine. You heard that right. Sure, it was based on some sort of blackmail, it was a marriage that might have been based on an emotional connection.

Jessica Biel is fine, I’m sure. I’ll forever be waiting for Nailed, the David O Russell movie that was shot (mostly) but shut down (entirely) because of some bad business decisions outside of the movie’s control. Other than that, I’m frequently just “whelmed” with Biel, who does okay.

Really, I’ll never forgive her for dating Justin Timberlake right around the time he stopped making music and started hanging around the set of Saturday Night Live, asking if they needed a hand – maybe a Britney Spears joke?

Good news via Collider – She’s out of discussions to take on the role of Viper. In the Biel or No Biel game, they have turned down the banker’s offer.

Now we have to replace Viper, who is oddly not in the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller comic line that ‘The Wolverine’ is meant to be based on.

Full disclosure, I haven’t read that line yet. I used to think disclosing these things were not important, but I got some flack recently for re-reading the X-Men ‘Days of Future Past’ storyline because it might be the basis for X-Men: Second Class (my title) because I “hadn’t read it before.”

Look – it was released before I was born, it’s not my X-Men. I don’t read a lot of 616 X-Men, which is my own fault. I’m working on it. To better help us all understand.

The Wolverine will start shooting next month is Australia with Hugh Jackman reprising the title role and Hiroyuki Sanada, Hal Yamanouchi, Rila Fukushima, and Tao Okamoto as Shingen (Yakuza boss), Yashida, Yukio (assassin) and Mariko (daughter of Shingen, one time love-not-blackmail fiancee of Wolverine).