With The Wolverine hitting theaters today, 20th Century Fox released a brand new promo banner for this superhero sequel starring Hugh Jackman. The film opened strong during 10 PM and midnight screenings last night, earning a healthy $4 million, putting it on track for a $65 million to $70 million three-day opening weekend. Last month, Paramount's World War Z earned $3.6 million from Thursday screenings, en route to a $66 million opening weekend. Take a look at the banner, then read on for details about the movie's mid-credit sequence from director director James Mangold. There will be spoilers contained below the banner, so stop reading now if you want to head into the weekend spoiler-free.

Wolverine International Banner

If you're planning on seeing The Wolverine in theaters this weekend, be sure to stick around for a scene shown midway through the credits, that helps set up next year's X-Men: Days of Future Past. The sequence shows Hugh Jackman's Logan meeting Patrick Stewart's Professor X and Ian McKellen's Magneto at an airport. Here's what James Mangold had to say about how the scene came together.

"I had finished the movie and Future Past had started shooting, a couple months ago, and we had been talking about what to do, if anything, in the tail credits of this movie. It's something I had been talking about with Simon Kinberg (Simon Kinberg producer) and Bryan Singer at that point about what we might do to kind of feed into it. My only stipulation that was important to me was just that I really didn't want it to be tongue-in-cheek. I feel like a lot of these bonus things almost make the film into a joke, and that wasn't interesting to me. I thought it would be more interesting to try and actually do something quite promising, actually say something and promise something and give people a piece of a story. The whole sequence was built around the shot where we'd unveil Patrick, and I created this shot where he's weaving through all these frozen airport patrons and that is Patrick Stewart with a joystick and electric wheelchair and that isn't easy. He's doing a kind of Olympic slalom through all these extras and uh, he's a badass on that thing."

The director also revealed that he was glad X-Men: Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer has the job of explaining how Professor X survived the events in X-Men: The Last Stand.

"Yes, it is his job and I know they have one, so I'll leave it to them to unveil it."