The blessing and the curse of adapting a film from the X-Men universe is the breadth of material. They have been featured in Marvel comics since their creation in 1963. There are hundreds of mutants, thousands of stories, and endless possibilities to adapt for the big screen. Do you tell one story? Many stories? Focus on one character? All the characters? Go political? Go sci-fi? Go topical?
The Wolverine fuses together a mismatched batch of characters and stories connected to the Wolverine Japanese Saga and the Silver Samurai. In a nutshell, we discover that Wolverine saved a Japanese general during World War II from being evaporated during the bombing of Nagasaki. In the present day, a skilled mutant/ninja/assassin named Yukio is sent to America to bring Wolverine face to face with the man he saved. That man is now the leader of a multi-billion dollar corporation and promises that he can make Wolverine a mortal man again.