Though the comic book world can be a very dark place, what with all those evil supervillains and bloody battles and heroic deaths and whatnot, a comic book movie director can only show so much of that stuff without risking the film’s commercial prospects. Mainstream superhero tales will push the constraints of the PG-13 rating as far as they’ll stretch, but it’s very rare that they’ll actually break through them.

But hey, that’s what unrated director’s cuts are for. In the case of The Wolverine, James Mangold states that while he’s “very happy” with the theatrical cut, he has plans to release an even more violent unrated edition for home video. Hit the jump to see what he wants to add in.

Mangold discussed his DVD/Blu-ray plans with Digital Spy. “I’m very happy with the cut, and the studio was very generous in terms of letting me finish the movie as I wanted, but I do think we will have a slightly more violent version… let’s say an unrated, a bloodier version,” he said.

The filmmaker elaborated on exactly which scenes he’s eager to include in the home video release.

There’s about ten or 12 minutes of scenes that I’d love people to see, that we’ll produce some kind of longer version of the movie at some point on Blu-ray or whatever. There’s another great scene with Hiro Sanada and a much more elaborate battle with ninjas from the third act that is a pretty huge battle sequence that you’ll see.

Based on his other comments, though, The Wolverine is already plenty brutal. “I was amazed that we got that through,” he said of a scene in which Wolverine sticks his hand into his own chest.

[T]he way the rules work in the States is they’re not human, you’re not held to the same standard as if they were human, so it was almost an act of convenient anti-mutant-ness! The MPAA views mutants as less than human, and therefore their pain is not worth as much of our anxiety, or not as troubling to children. But that did work to my benefit, so I shouldn’t criticize it too much!

It’ll be interesting to see Mangold’s unencumbered vision for the movie, and compare it to the MPAA-approved one. On the other hand, though, more violence doesn’t automatically make for a better movie, and it could turn out that those 10-12 minutes were cut for good reason. Will you buy the DVD/Blu-ray to check out the director’s cut?