Wizard magazine has learned from its masters well. Like Stan Lee, whose diahhretically verbose editorials used a lot of words to say very little, the magazine is able to spin a little bit of quoted straw into feature gold.

There’s a lot of text flying over there about Gavin Hood’s Wolverine (it’s still so weird to type that) but most of it is info you should already know.

Allow me to encapsulate: Gavin Hood and David Benioff are the core creative team, with Hugh Jackman as producer. Shooting should start later this year for a 2008 release – gotta have snow in those Canadian mountains for the Weapon X material. And don’t expect much of a trip to Japan; this is origin-oriented, with a likely focus on the Weapon X story, and perhaps a detour to Vietnam with Team X. As for exactly when it takes place, Brian Cox said ’17 years ago’, but without a reference point or a final script, that could mean a lot of different things.

Possible supporting roles include Brian Cox as Stryker (digital de-leathering necessary); Tyler Mane as Sabertooth and someone as the Blob. More X-men? Probably not.

And that’s it. One quote from Jackman tells you everything you need to know: What we need to do is establish who he is and find out how he became Wolverine. And by the end of the movie, I want it to be that you definitely knew who this guy was, like Mad Max and Dirty Harry.

In other words, Fox and Rothman are playing it safe with this, giving people a core story the studio knows they’ll bite into, possibly using the success to gauge how far afield they can take it. Not that you should expect Fox to take anything very far beyond the bank at this point. Gavin Hood or no, expectations here are still at half mast.