Logan director James Mangold wanted to make a different kind of superhero movie. So his dark take on the final big screen outing for Wolverine is dark and violent and, oh yeah, it doesn’t have a post-credits scene (although it does have a pre-film teaser featuring Deadpool).

“The only way we came out with a different movie was trying to do it differently,” he tells the Sun down the line from New York City. “So I was pretty fanatical about saying, ‘If this is how these other movies are doing it, we’re going the other way.’ If there’s normally a cameo or an end-credit scene, we’re not doing that. That’s essentially turning it into a product that has to come out of the widget machine the same way every time and that’s not how the best movies are going to get made... in any genre.”

In his last outing with star Hugh Jackman in 2013’s The Wolverine, Mangold added a mid-credits scene that showed Logan being warned of a new threat to the mutant race by Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart).

Set in 2029, with the X-Men all but wiped out, Logan could have added an end-credits scene hinting at the villain that might have killed them off.

But Mangold wasn’t having it.

“The second it’s like, ‘Well, you’re supposed to serve cheesecake at the end of the meal,’ my response is, ‘Really? Is that the new rule? I can’t serve dinner at my house without cheesecake at the end?’ That’s a good enough reason not to do it. And really, what are those scenes but ads for another movie? We were trying to make a movie that begun and ended on its own terms. There was nothing else to say, because we had said it. I didn’t make Cop Land and put a post-credit scene in there. I didn’t make Walk the Line, and then after the credits put in one extra song with Reese (Witherspoon) and Joaquin (Phoenix).”

Mangold, who co-wrote the film with Scott Frank and Michael Green, was careful not to “contradict or trip on things that have been referenced elsewhere.” But he says he wanted to craft a film that honoured Wolverine’s comic book roots.

“Joe Schuster’s Superman is not the same now as he once was,” Mangold says. “We have alternate universes and reinventions of characters. Why did all that happen? Because there’s an effort of the artists and writers to be fresh and to express themselves and not stay locked in a universe.”

MDaniell@postmedia.com

Twitter: @markhdaniell