2024-07-26 13:10:02
Major spoiler alert: This post will absolutely ruin this movie for you. Please don’t read this unless you have seen the movie or want to get spoiled.
While the hoopla of Deadpool & Wolverine was all about the introduction of two iconic characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the movie is also about saying goodbye.
In the film, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) faces the prospect of the collapse of his entire timeline, which has been destroyed by the death of Wolverine in 2017’s Logan. To save it, he seeks out a still-living, alternate-universe version of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). But this new Wolvie has seen the rest of his X-Men die, and he can’t stop blaming himself. Together, they’re sent to the void (the same void that we see in Disney+’s Loki) where they sync up with an island of misfit toys: Marvel superheroes (mainly from Fox’s filmography) that, for one reason or another, did not make it to Disney’s promised land of perpetual intellectual property.
Deadpool and Wolverine’s fictional conflict is a self-referential gag about Disney’s real-life 2019 acquisition of Fox and its plethora of film rights, which includes some significant Marvel comic book characters. Reynolds’s Deadpool is one of those superheroes, but he’s currently the only actor playing a Marvel mutant slated to continue on and make the transition to Marvel Studios and the MCU. Having disposable superheroes of yore sent to the MCU trash heap is a meta way for Deadpool to make an inside joke about how Disney (and, to an extent, Marvel) now owns everything, including esoteric superhero nostalgia that you never knew existed and Deadpool himself.
They first meet the Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm (played by Chris Evans, reprising his pre-MCU role from 2005) who Deadpool mistakes for Captain America. All three are captured by the psychic villain Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin, playing an X-Men comic character we’ve never seen on film before). After Deadpool taunts her, as he taunts everyone, she telekinetically skins Storm alive before Deadpool and Wolverine make a miraculous, jetpack-fueled escape.
The duo eventually meet Storm’s compatriots, who have been living in this suspended state for years. There’s the half-human half-vampire Blade (Wesley Snipes, reprising his role from the Blade trilogy), ninja Elektra (Jennifer Garner, last seen in the 2005 Daredevil sequel of the same name), murder clone X-23 (Dafne Keen, who appeared with Jackman in 2017’s Logan), and mutant energy wielder Gambit (Channing Tatum, finally playing the part Disney’s Fox acquisition supposedly made impossible). Faced with an eternity of storytelling purgatory, the forgotten heroes team up with their new friends to help the two get back to Deadpool’s main timeline. The misfits break into Cassandra’s lair, drawing the attention of her henchmen and allowing the bosom buddies to take on Cassandra.
At the end of the film, Deadpool and Wolverine dispatch Nova as well as Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), the Time Variance Authority (TVA) middle manager who sent them to the void in the first place. They save Deadpool’s collapsing timeline and return home. Blade and the gang are rewarded by getting restored to their own timelines, mainly off-screen. Everything’s squared away and our ambiguously coupled duo get to be friends happily ever after.
And one post-credits scene can’t change that … or can it?
There’s one scene that happens at the end of Deadpool & Wolverine’s credits scroll.
In it, we find Deadpool at the TVA headquarters. As established in Loki, the TVA are essentially cops who watch every parallel timeline in the multiverse and make sure nothing goes sideways. Also established in Loki — and so many Marvel movies that deal with the splintering multiverse — the TVA are susceptible to serious goofs. (Frankly, they aren’t very good at their job.) They’re also an authoritarian agency that imposes their will on these timelines and the countless people who live within them, so you don’t have to feel bad for them when they mess up.
Deadpool breaks the fourth wall; he wants to clear something up. Although he insulted Cassandra Nova and blamed it on Johnny Storm, he says he isn’t responsible for Storm’s death, even though it seemed like he was. He claims that he simply repeated what Storm told them when they were captured.
To prove his point, he rewinds TVA surveillance footage and shows us what really happened. Sure enough, Johnny Storm unleashes a cuss-filled, raunch-heavy monologue — delivered in Evans’s native Boston accent, no less — that includes references to fellatio, analingus, Juggernaut secretions, and derogatory comments about Cassandra’s baldness. He tells Deadpool that he can repeat it but would risk being skinned alive if he did because she is so beyond awful. The merc with a mouth is innocent!
Perhaps more importantly, he apparently has access to TVA HQ and ostensibly its timeline-jumping technology. By the logic and structure of this convoluted universe, that means Deadpool might be able to show up and snark in any MCU property (which, obviously, Marvel wants you to know). For now, though, he’s just content to show you Chris Evans saying absolutely filthy things.
