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According to new Hollywood Reporter columnist Roger Friedman, Chris McQuarrie has finished the screenplay for the next Wolverine movie. Friedman's source confirms that the sequel's storyline follows the first mini-series that writer Chris Claremont and artist Frank Miller created back in 1982. In it Wolverine heads off to Japan and romances the daughter of a powerful man that has connections to the Yakuza. "It’s a beautiful story," Friedman's source said of McQuarrie's adaptation, "and will be very different than the first film."

Valkyrie and The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie has been hired to write the Wolverine sequel. According to Variety, McQuarrie came in and pitched his idea for the second film's storyline, which will be centered in Japan and show how Wolverine learned the ways of the samurai, and got the job.

McQuarrie wrote a draft of the first X-Men screenplay but did not receive any screen credit.

During the Teen Choice Awards held this past weekend, Hugh Jackman got called on stage to accept the award for Best Action/Adventure movie for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Backstage the actor remarked to MTV's Splash Page that work had just begun on developing the storyline for Wolverine 2 and that the film's storyline would draw from the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller Japan saga seen in Wolverine's first mini-series published back in the early 1980s. "I think the fans love that saga. It's my favorite saga of the Wolverine stories," said Jackman. "That's a movie I've longed to make from the beginning, so that's where we're heading."

After opening to the tune of $85 million dollars domestic last weekend it seems that the wishful thinking speculation about a sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine is turning into something more solid. Variety's Michael Fleming mentions today that 20th Century Fox and Seed Productions, the production company headed by Wolverine star Hugh Jackman and John Palermo, are "in development" on a second Wolverine movie. Fleming's report mentions the story for the second film would follow Wolverine on his adventures in Japan, a story-arc from the character's first solo comic book mini-series from the early 1980s. That information isn't new; not only is the notion of a trip to Japan teased at the end of the credits in X-Men Origins, both Jackman and producer Lauren Shuler Donner have mentioned their desire to adapt the Japanese samurai saga for the second film.

So far no screenwriter has been hired to begin work on the project.