Warning: This article will extensively discuss all sorts of spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine, including cameos and its ending. You’ve been warned.
After Spider-Man: No Way Home ended up being one of the biggest movies ever while also paying tribute to past Peter Parkers, it only made sense to do something similar with Fox’s Marvel properties now that everything is being rounded up into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Enter Deadpool & Wolverine.
This attempt at closure isn’t nearly so clean as No Way Home’s, though, because there’s just too much stuff and they drew from all over–and, very conspicuously, we don’t get any appearances by any members of the X-Men other than Wolverine himself. So it’s not really much of a bow for the old X-Men franchise overall. But, as we’ll discuss below, it sort of enables the possibility for one to happen later, and the pieces have already been put in place for that after The Marvels last year.
Deadpool & Wolverine picks up not long after the events of Deadpool 2. Wade meets with Happy Hogan and tries to join the Avengers. Happy says no, and Wade decides to retire from doing violence and sell cars instead.
And then some folks from the Time Variance Authority (TVA)–the folks from the Loki series who control the multiverse–show up and pull Wade out of time and bring him to a man called Paradox. Paradox says Deadpool’s universe is dying because its anchor being, Wolverine, was killed during the events of Logan, and he wants Deadpool to help him finish it off using something called a “time ripper”–if he does so, he’ll get to join the MCU and become an Avenger. Why he would ask Deadpool to do this is unclear, as is what he was going to actually get Deadpool to do–neither topic is ever broached. Instead, Deadpool goes rogue and starts hopping through timelines to find a suitable Wolverine to replace our dead one.
We’re then treated to a fun montage of alternate Wolverines, including a Henry Cavill one, and eventually he finds the title character, who’s getting drunk at a bar. Deadpool brings this Logan back to the TVA, and Paradox is baffled because this doesn’t help his plan at all–so he pokes them both with one of those glowy TVA time sticks and sends them to “the Void,” a post-apocalyptic place that exists at the end of every timeline.
Naturally, we get a lot of Mad Max jokes here as we meet lots of random folks from various Fox Marvel movies–such as Pyro from X2 and The Last Stand, and a brand-new version of the Juggernaut, complete with hilarious, comic-accurate helmet. These baddies are led by one Cassandra Nova, Professor X’s evil twin sister who died in the womb. She has all the same powers as Xavier, except she has to actually physically touch your brain to read your thoughts–something she does a lot Deadpool & Wolverine, to very creepy effect. She’s basically the god of this world.
She demonstrates this for us early on with the first member of the local superhero resistance: Johnny Storm from the original Fantastic Four movies, played by Chris Evans. Evans’ time in the film is short but incredibly sweet, and Deadpool wraps it up by telling Cassandra that Johnny had said a bunch of graphically violent things he wanted to do to her, which Johnny claims is totally fake. Cassandra doesn’t care, and pulls all the skin from his body with a single gesture, causing his carcass to collapse into a pile of bones and meat. Fortunately, there are other resistance folks out there as well: Dafne Keen’s X-23, Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Wesley Snipes’ Blade, and Channing Tatum’s Gambit (a long-rumored project that never actually happened).
Together, they storm Cassandra’s base, which is built into Ant-Man’s gigantic corpse (it’s not explained). Deadpool and Wolverine are able to render Cassandra powerless by putting the Juggernaut’s big helmet on her, but in the middle of the confrontation, she’s shot by Pyro, who’s been told by Paradox he can return to his timeline if he kills her. This inspires Logan to save her life, for some reason, which in turn inspires Cassandra to send them back to the timeline using a sling ring she took from a Doctor Strange at some point in the past.
But after she does, she finds out from Pyro that Paradox tried to kill her, and she decides to end everything. She goes to New York to use the time ripper herself, and in the process unleashes the Deadpool Corps–all the Deadpool variants from the Void. And our Deadpool and Wolverine have to fight them. Which they do, but everybody survives their gruesome injuries except for Nicepool, who doesn’t have regenerative healing.
Now it’s time to stop Cassandra, who’s pulling some glowing cables out of the time-ripper device in an attempt to destroy all timelines (it is what it is). Deadpool tries to sacrifice himself by touching similar cables in a different room to stop her, but he can’t reach them both, so Wolverine helps–they touch the cables, in slow motion while Madonna plays, and the timeline is saved. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s literally what happened.
Hunter B-15 then swoops in to arrest Paradox for doing this whole unauthorized timeline-pruning plan in the first place, and then Deadpool asks her if they can keep the Fox universe alive and rescue Elektra, Blade and the others from the Void. Hunter B-15 agrees, and Deadpool goes back to his life and brings Wolverine and X-23 with him. The end.
What Deadpool & Wolverine’s ending means for the MCU
For a movie that was supposed to introduce Deadpool to the MCU, it’s an interesting conclusion since there aren’t really any meaningful MCU connections in Deadpool & Wolverine at all. While the TVA and the Void both originated from the MCU with Loki, they technically both exist beyond it–they’re outside of time, and thus above the multiverse. So these ideas serve as overworlds for all Marvel stuff now that nearly everything is under this one franchise umbrella. The timelines themselves, though, remain completely separate throughout this film, and Deadpool never enters any MCU timeline aside from the scene at the beginning of the movie with Happy Hogan–but that’s an anomalous scene that doesn’t make any sense even within itself, so it’s probably best not to scrutinize it too much.
In any case, the integration of mutants into the MCU, and maybe even some of the versions of mutants we already know, is still coming in the future–it’s a certainty after The Marvels ended with Monica Rambeau stuck in a parallel universe with the X-Man Hank McCoy, aka Beast. Deadpool & Wolverine is probably not the place to really get that party started, though, since it’s a comedy. So, instead, this movie is essentially a meta story about the real-world merger between Disney and 20th Century Fox.
Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was always the MVP of the X-Men movie franchise, and the ones that didn’t have him in it struggled at the box office–that’s what it means that he’s the “anchor being” of that universe. And with the MCU in play, and Jackman apparently done with the part after Logan, the Fox-Marvel universe is past its shelf life and ready to be put out of its misery–thus Paradox’s plan to nuke the timeline.
By the end of the movie, the net effect is that nothing at all has changed. All the old Marvel franchises get to keep existing in their own timelines, including Deadpool. But it does establish all of it as being under one big multiversal umbrella, where it will be available should Marvel want to put Thomas Jane’s Punisher in an Avengers movie or something. So it’s basically that it enables change without enacting it.
Does Deadpool & Wolverine have a post-credits scene?
Deadpool & Wolverine actually has copious content during the credits, though it’s not just the normal Marvel teaser stuff. During the credits scroll, you’ll be treated to a montage of behind-the-scenes videos from the X-Men films, featuring Jackman and many of his fellow former castmates who otherwise weren’t in the movie.
And then we get one more nice comedy bit at the end of the credits, where Deadpool uses TVA equipment to confirm that Johnny had said all that stuff about Cassandra–and we’re treated to a delightfully crude monologue from Chris Evans.
