Yesterday’s Super Bowl brought us our first look at Deadpool 3—now formally Deadpool & Wolverine—and a taste of what’s to come as Ryan Reynolds’ infamous mercenary storms his way into Marvel’s sacred timeline. But what else can we glean from the trailer about the world of the X-Men’s first major foray into the MCU?
Happy Birthday, Wade
The trailer opens with Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), now horrifyingly toupéed and celebrating his birthday with his girlfriend, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Featured on Wade’s cake, as well as attending the celebration in his apartment, are Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), Dopinder (Karan Soni), Blind Al (Leslie Uggams), Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and her girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna), and Buck (Randal Reeder). Interestingly, there’s two extra characters who are in attendance…
X-Force Lives, Kinda
Shatterstar (Lewis Tan) and completely ordinary human Peter (Rob Delany). The two—one a classic Marvel Comics character and frequent member of X-Force and X-Factor Investigations (alongside his boyfriend, Rictor), the other an entirely original character made for the movies—first appeared in Deadpool 2 as members of Wade’s X-Force team who promptly died horrible deaths within minutes of starting their first mission. Shatterstar found himself mulched up by a helicopter’s blades while trying to land, while Peter got violently melted apart by the acid vomit of the similarly-ill-fated X-Force member Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgård).
Just how Shatterstar is back remains to be seen—Wade rescued Peter when Negasonic and Yukio managed to repair Cable’s time travelling device in Deadpool 2’s post-credits scene, at least. But he thought Shatterstar sucked, so why would he save him too?
Enter the TVA
Wade’s party is rudely interrupted by the arrival of some surprising goons: agents of the Time Variance Authority, the guardians of the sacred multiversal timeline from Loki. Although the second season of Loki climaxed with the titular god of mischief choosing to sacrifice himself to maintain the multiverse, the TVA reformed to live on and hunt down the variants of Kang while protecting the multiverse from myriad threats—and given Wade’s limited time-travel antics at the end of the last movie, it kind of makes sense they’re a little interested in him.
Tom Wambsgans, Time-CEO
Wade awakens in the TVA to be offered a glorious purpose by its seeming new manager: Matthew MacFadyen! His pitch to Wade is simple: be the hero again, and come hang out with the MCU heroes, as we see clips from Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Captain America: Civil War play out on the TVA’s monitors.
The Mummudrai?
Some very interesting shots play out as we hear Wade crack wise about coming to save the MCU as “Marvel Jesus.” The first is a brief shot of a mysterious bald figure, as we see them looking out over a scene of destruction. Yes, X-Men films are usually involving a particular famous bald mutant, but there is another: there’s been rumors swirling that Emma Corrin will play a version of Cassandra Nova in Deadpool & Wolverine, and this certainly looks like it could be her.
Introduced in the first arc of Grant Morrison and Frank Quietley’s New X-Men in 2001, Cassandra Nova is a wildly powerful psychic mutant, and the twin sister of Charles Xavier himself. Killed in the womb by Charles with his burgeoning psychic power, Cassandra was his “mummudrai,” an evil twisted spiritual reflection of Charles that, having picked up some of Charles’ power herself, managed to survive being stillborn after she attempted to kill her twin brother in-utero. Spending years plotting revenge against him, Cassandra made her presence known to the X-Men and Charles at large again by engaging in the genocidal slaughter of 16 million mutants on the island of Genosha, a safe haven for mutantkind established by Magneto in the wake of the nation’s previous human-led, anti-mutant apartheid state.
Welcome to Madripoor
We next see Wade in costume as he walks through a fancy casino, up to a man with a very distinct haircut, in a white suit. This is, of course, our first of two tiny glimpses at the return of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, but it’s a very specific version: Patch, an alter ego Logan established after the X-Men were believed by the world to have been killed during an encounter with the demonic entity known as the Adversary.
While many of the resurrected X-Men relocated to the Australian Outback to surreptitiously continue their heroic missions, Logan donned a white suit and eye patch to go with his new moniker and went off to Madripoor, a fictional Southeast Asian island nation that has, over the years, played the part of a haven of crime and shady doings in Marvel’s comics. Madripoor officially entered the MCU in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Given the multiversal shenanigans at play here, it’s hard to say if this is meant to be the Madripoor of the “sacred timeline” reality, or some version of it adjacent to the reality of the Fox X-Men movies and their own messy timeline.
Deadpool vs the TVA
As the action kicks in we get the first of a few interesting fight scenes: the first is in a snowy forest as Wade massacres his way through a bunch of TVA agents. Given this is after he’s re-suited up, it’s safe to assume that at some point he turns on the TVA, or they try at least to stop him from doing something that could disrupt the multiverse. Intriguingly, this snowy forest setting matches up with set pictures we saw of Wade and Logan fighting what appeared to be a version of Sabretooth, Logan’s long-time archnemesis. Those set pictures also seemingly showed Sabretooth having been beheaded during the battle, so a lot is going on here.
The Ruins of Fox
The very cool shot of Wade stylishly reloading has another fun gag in the background: in this barren wasteland, we see the submerged remnants of the 20th Century Fox logo. Of course a nod to the acquisition of the studio by Disney in 2018—and its transition now to 20th Century Studios—we’d previously seen set pictures of filming of this sequence that gave us our first look at Hugh Jackman’s yellow-and-blue Wolverine costume.
The Age of the Apocalypse
Whether this is the same wasteland as the one with the Fox logo remains to be seen, but we also get this apocalyptic-looking location here too, as Wade watches a chained-up TVA agent get dragged away by some mysterious purple smoke. We see a few more shots of this place throughout the trailer, including a convoy guarded by masked, hooded soldiers, and an extension of the base we see being attacked here. We also get another interesting character in this location, too…
Pyro Flames On
John Allardyce himself, aka Pyro! St. John, as he was named in the comics, was a long time member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, introduced in 1981 as part of the iconic “Days of Future Past” storyline where the villainous team attempted to assassinate anti-mutant senator Robert Kelly, inadvertently establishing an apocalyptic timeline where mutantkind is hunted down and slaughtered. Pyro eventually transitions from the Brotherhood into its reformation as Freedom Force, Mystique’s compromise with Val Cooper and the U.S. government to trade pardons for their past crimes for working as an official federal task force. Eventually, he succumbed to the Legacy Virus, dying in a heroic act to protect Senator Kelly, and in turn changing his opinions on mutants—but Pyro eventually got resurrected, first by the sinister ancient external Selene as part of the Necrosha event, and then eventually on Krakoa as part of early experiments by the mutant circuit known as the Five, where he signed up with Kitty Pryde’s Marauders.
Another holder of the Pyro mantle, a queer mutant named Simon Lasker, was introduced in X-Men Gold, first as a brainwashed member of Mesmero’s Brotherhood and then a turned-good romantic interest for the teenage, time-displaced Iceman, but the Allardyce version of the character was brought into the Fox X-Men universe in X2 and The Last Stand, played by Aaron Stanford, who has returned decades later to play him once more in Deadpool & Wolverine.
He’s Very Good at What He Does
The trailer climaxes back against the Fox ruins, as Deadpool finds himself smashed through debris by an unknown assailant… one revealed to be none other than Logan himself, who gives Deadpool a hand up by offering a trademark “snikt!” with his claws, seemingly going to shank our would-be hero.
Interestingly, lying just off to the left of Wade here as the camera moves in is a tattered comic bearing the Secret Wars logo. It’s specifically the version of the logo for the 2015 event of the same name, not the original 1984 comic saga. Although it’s impossible to tell just which issue it’s meant to be given the damage, it makes sense given that the series is currently playing a huge role in Marvel’s movie plans: it dealt with the fallout of “Incursions,” reality-destroying events that saw universes in the multiverse collide and eradicate each other. Given we’re literally getting a movie called Avengers: Secret Warsat some point, it’s going to come up a lot in the next few years.
No doubt we’ll learn even more about Deadpool’s shenanigans before Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters July 26.
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