Long before Hugh Jackman emerged from the adamantium vat, Kurt Russell was a fan-favorite to play Wolverine. This might be the closest he’ll get to anything with that name.
According to Coming Soon, the genre icon is “in talks” to join up with the young Wolverines(!!!) in the superfluous remake of RED DAWN. No other details are known, but we can probably hypothesize that he’d play something similar to the Powers Boothe role of a colonel who becomes the de facto military strategist for the kid guerrillas.
Russell would star with Kirk’s dad/future Thor Chris Hemsworth, Adrienne Palicki (“Friday Night Lights”) and Josh Peck (“Drake and Josh”, THE WACKNESS) in the feature directing debut of longtime stuntman/second unit director Dan Bradley. The 1984 John Milius flick (perhaps the finest example of chest-thumping patriotic propaganda-as-entertainment) revolved around a group of Colorado teens who become insurgents battling a US invasion of Russian and Cuban armies.
What’s particularly interesting about this rumor is Russell’s reps apparently (and sadly) shot down Sly Stallone’s invivation to join THE EXPENDABLES because he wasn’t doing any “ensemble acting.” So if there’s any truth to this, Kurt Russell would almost certainly be the name at the top of the poster…