New 'Logan' Photo Confirms The Obvious: That Little Girl Is X-23

If the hints in the trailer and the details from trade reports recently weren't enough to convince you that Logan would see the introduction of the mutant known as X-23, the confirmation you've been waiting for has arrived.

A new photo from the official Logan Instagram account (with the username "wponx") has confirmed what we have all assumed for a little while now. Young actress Dafne Keen, who can be seen several times in the Logan trailer, is playing Laura Kinney, the mutant clone of Weapon X, aka Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). Check out the X-23 photo from Logan after the jump.

In the first trailer for Logan, we hear Professor X (Patrick Stewart) tell Wolverine, "She's like you. Very much like you." While some not familiar with the comics might assume that to mean she has healing powers, her similarities only begin there. Here's the photo from Instagram, which had the caption "Laura" accompanying it:

Laura Kinney is known as X-23 in the comics because she's the 23rd attempt by an organization to create a clone of Wolverine. Perhaps Essex Corp is behind the program since they are teased at the end of X-Men: Apocalypse, even though the timeline doesn't necessarily add up since this movie is said to take place after the epilogue of X-Men: Days of Future Past. While the program initially started out as an attempt to merely replicate the Weapon X program that resulted in the creation of Wolverine as we know him (with his adamantium skeleton and claws), they decided to just try to clone him instead. Laura is the first successful attempt.

Though Laura and Wolverine share similarities, in the comics she only has two claws that come out of each ofher hands, and she also has one that can be popped out of each of her feet. Also, her skeleton isn't laced with adamantium like Wolverine, but her claws are coated with the rare, indestructible metal. Otherwise, she mostly works alone, though she has teamed up with X-Men and X-Force just like Wolverine, and she even dons a variation on his classic yellow costume.

So far, there are only brief shots of Laura using her claws in the movie, but you have to look really closely in the trailer to see one of them, and you can't exactly see her claws. But there's one shot that likely shows Laura's claws close-up, confronting Wolverine in the domestic trailer (slightly different from the international one in our breakdown), but we don't see Laura's face in that shot.

Since this is Hugh Jackman's last outing as Wolverine, is 20th Century Fox looking to set up Laura for a hopeful franchise to follow? Will she become part of the X-Men franchise somehow? These are all questions that currently don't have an answer, but may have one by the time Logan rolls into theaters on March 3, 2017.