This morning we got our latest look at Deadpool & Wolverine, and while it doesn’t give as much about the film’s premise away as the first trailer, it’s filled with a whole lotta Logan—and some surprising other details and hints. Let’s go through what we spotted, shall we?
A World That Hates and Fears Him
The trailer opens with a down-and-out Logan (Hugh Jackman) drinking his sorrows away at a bar—except the bartender doesn’t want him there. “You’re not welcome here,” the barkeep growls. “You’re not welcome anywhere.” Dime-a-dozen anti-mutant hatred, or something to do with the thing we learn about this version of Wolverine later on in the trailer?
Claw Problems
Logan’s miserable drinking is interrupted by the arrival of Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), who stresses that he doesn’t really have time to argue with Logan before trying to whisk him away—presumably, this is his idea of trying to recruit Wolverine to whatever multiversal mission the TVA gave him, as glimpsed in the first trailer.
Logan goes to brandish his adamantium claws, only to see themjust partially emerge. This being Deadpool, of course we get an erection joke.
The End of All Realities, and Maybe Canada
As Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” kicks in, we jump to Wade and Logan in that desolate wasteland we saw glimpses of in the last trailer—the one with the very unsubtle 20th Century Fox logo buried in it, and where we saw that issue of Secret Wars hanging around.
Among the debris now, we now see the partial ruins of the Toronto CN Tower—from, of course, Logan’s home nation of Canada. This appears to either be some kind of limbo area for dying realities, or maybe even the ruins of one already dead, given all the debris and the hints to Secret Wars’ incursions we already got, but if that wasn’t clear enough…
Wade’s Stakes
We cut back to the birthday party that opened the first teaser, where Wade, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and the rest of their friends (and a good couple members of the ill-fated X-Force team, Shatterstar and Peter, played by Lewis Tan and Rob Delany, respectively) celebrate his birthday. “I’m about to lose everything I’ve ever cared about,” Wade tells Logan, to which he replies that it’s not his problem.
Of course, Multiverse of Madness introduced us to the MCU’s take on incursions—where two realities in the multiverse smash into each other, wiping them both out. In the comics, it’s this slow and steady death of the multiverse that lead to the second Secret Wars event, and with it the re-jiggering of Marvel’s prime reality of Earth-616 and the seeming death of the Ultimate universe, Earth-1610 (it got better, this is comics we’re talking about). Now, as the MCU sets the stage for its own riff on Secret Wars, it looks like Deadpool’s take on the Fox X-Men universe is under threat now too—presumably that’s why the TVA pulls him in, to either save it or to uplift him to its own “sacred” version of Earth-616.
Where Is This Wolverine Really From?
Wade angrily counters Logan’s rebuttal by asking him of it wasn’t his problem when “his world” went to shit, and it’s here that things get really interesting: is this actually the Logan of the Fox continuity?
We’ve known for a while that Deadpool & Wolverine wanted to respect that the events of Jackman’s past appearances would in some way matter to this movie—despite the fact when we last saw him in Logan he was extremely dead. Putting aside both the fact that the continuity of Fox’s X-Men saga is almost as convoluted as anything the source material could muster, and the fact that Logan’s recovered from dying before anyway, the way people talk about Logan in this trailer definitely frames him as a Wolverine, but maybe not the exact one we saw in those films.
After Matthew MacFadyen’s mysterious TVA manager tells Wade (who has dragged Logan back to their HQ) that this Wolverine failed his world, we get a little better picture of why he was so loathed in the opening scene of the trailer. But that reality is still standing, so it’s not like he failed and let it get completely destroyed at that point. And if it’s the reality of Logan and the other Fox X-Men movies—which is really confusing enough that it should be multiple timelines of continuity—what was the turning point on Logan given everything he went through there?
Maybe the question is not where this Wolverine is from, but when—did Wade manage to pluck him out of a time between the events of Logan’s back story, where in between some version of 2014 and 2028 mutantkind was nearly wiped out? Would that be enough to count as having “failed his world?” if most humans would see the near-eradication of mutants as a selfish, cruel benefit?
No Time for Trauma, Only Action
Let’s stop thinking about that for a moment as we cut back to that multiversal limbo, and see Wade and Logan duke it out with each other. This movie is going to have a lot of fun with two surly protagonists with healing factors, isn’t it?
The Lil’est Orthopedics
“I don’t know anything about saving worlds,” Wade says, “but you do,” as he implores to Wolverine. Once again, the Wolverine we eventually dug into in the Fox movies was hardly a clear-cut heroic figure tasked with saving worlds, so maybe this still isn’t that version of him, but something closer to a more idealized X-Man than we realize.
That moment actually seemingly occurs in a different scene we briefly cut to, where Wade shows Logan the picture of him and his friends at his birthday party—the forest area glimpsed briefly in the last trailer. But it’s played over a shot of a battered and bruised Deadpool and Wolverine (note here that Wade is now carrying golden pistols, which he doesn’t have earlier in the trailer) as they walk heroically through a battle damaged city street. The gag here is in the background: the store named Liefeld’s Just Feet, a reference to Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld’s artistic predilection for avoiding drawing a character’s feet as much as possible.
E Is for Extinction
As we cut through multiple action shots—more of Wade fighting TVA agents like we saw in the first trailer, a little more of his scrap with Logan—we get our first proper look at Emma Corrin’s villain: and while their name isn’t mentioned anywhere in this trailer, there’s no way this isn’t Cassandra Nova.
Introduced in the legendary opening arc of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men in 2001, Cassandra is what is known to the Shi’ar Empire as a “Mummudrai”—a sinister manifestation of the self that all beings face in the womb. Cassandra was the Mummudrai to none other than Charles Xavier, taking a form and a semblance of his mutant abilities in utero while trying to murder him. Xavier fought back and seemingly killed his “sister” before he was even born, but Cassandra’s hate and vast psionic power lead to her surviving for decades after stillbirth, taking a shape not too dissimilar to Charles’ and plotting her vengeance in secret. It started with convincing the heir of Bolivar Trask’s legacy in the Sentinel Program to help her activate a Master Mold factory, deploying Sentinels to almost entirely wipe out the 16 million mutants that had made the isle of Genosha a new mutant state.
Your Future Lies in Genocide
A little more snippets of action later, we cut again back to Corrin’s Cassandra, as they drink from a tea cup.
The look here is definitely reminiscent of what Cassandra wore in her debut appearance in New X-Men #114, sans pith helmet, as she convinced Bolivar’s cousin, Donald Trask III, to activate the hidden Master Mold in South America, and the locale might be just the same—the first shot of Cassandra saw her walking out of what looked like a massive skull, which definitely feels evocative of the Master Mold as we see it in New X-Men #114… but we actually briefly get to see what it really is a little later.
The Guardian of the Void
You know multiversal madness is on the way because we then cut to this very intriguing shot of what certainly looks like Alioth: the gaseous guardian of the limbo-space known as the Void (maybe that’s where Logan and Wade are fighting?) that we saw in Loki.
Alioth was harnessed by He Who Remains, one of the legion cross-reality variants of Kang the Conqueror (formerly played by Jonathan Majors; Marvel’s plans for the character after parting ways with the actor remain unknown) in a war against the variants of himself across the multiverse, and then used to safeguard the dregs of timelines “pruned” by the TVA in Limbo. We saw gaseous purple-y clouds attacking people, including TVA agents, briefly in the first trailer—which now seemingly were tendrils of Alioth itself. Are we seeing the fallout of either Logan or maybe even parts of Wade’s timelines being pruned here?
Some Not So Merry Mutants
This fascinating shot seems to be of the post-apocalyptic reality we saw in the first trailer, pulled back a bit to reveal that their little tribe is walled off by the body parts of a giant-sized Ant-Man. Grim! This is also what we saw Cassandra Nova walk out of earlier.
But the body of a not-so-tiny hero isn’t the real Easter egg here: it’s that this scene is littered with cameos of mutant foes from across the Fox X-Men films. We can see First Class’s Azazel (played there by Jason Flemyng), where he was an operative in Sebastian Shaw’s Hellfire Club, as well as Kelly Hu’s Lady Deathstrike from X2, the adamantium-clawed villainess who was William Stryker’s personal bodyguard. We’re not too sure, but we think one of the figures on the left could even be Ray Park’s Toad from the first X-Men film, but who knows, considering he got fried by Storm in that movie.
Given this apocalyptic area is where we saw the Allardyce version of X2 and The Last Stand’s Pyro, played once more by Aaron Stanford—and was seemingly where we saw Alioth attacking in the last trailer too—it seems like the myriad minor villains of the Fox X-Men reality have formed an alliance in the Void. Or at least variants of them from pruned realities did?
Enter Dogpool
Back in front of Liefeld’s Just Feet, Wade embraces a tiny, raggedy mutt in Deadpool clothing: meet Dogpool, seemingly one of several Deadpool variants we’ll meet in this movie. The Deadpool of Earth-103173 in the comics, Dogpool was a dog named Wilson who developed his healing factor after being experimented on by the sinister self-replicating makeup, Mascara X. He wwas initiated into the Deadpool Corps, a team of multiversal variants of Deadpool, but was actually killed once and for all by Deadpool himself during the events of Deadpool Kills Deadpool, when a rival evil version of the Deadpool Corps began travelling the multiverse killing their heroic variants off.
Kneel Before Nova
In another interesting action scene, we see Logan try to go up against Cassandra, who effortlessly bats away his lunges and slices with telekinesis.
As Charles Xavier’s “twin,” Cassandra has similarly vast psionic powers, including his mutant telepathy—but because of the process of her “birth,” Cassandra actually has way more going on. As the anti-self Cassandra was born from copying Charles’ very DNA, and she used that to exploit his genome in such a way that she doesn’t just have the mutant power he would eventually manifest, but all the potential psionic powers he could’ve developed on top of that, like telekinesis, and the ability to project her own astral form. She also has even further powers as a Mummudrai beyond even that, like phasing and DNA manipulation.
LFG
The trailer climaxes on a few shots of Logan and Wolverine in action together, seemingly having settled their differences—as they both intone “let’s fucking go” to each other. Teamwork makes the dream work!
A Sorcerer’s Work
Speaking of teamwork, we see Logan and Wade jump from the arena we briefly saw Logan fighting Cassandra Nova in earlier… and into the trademark sparking portal of the mystics of Kamar-Taj, created by their magical “sling rings.” Is a mage we know helping Deadpool and Logan zip around? Is it Strange himself, or Wong helping them, or perhaps a variant of either of them? Did Wade just happen to steal a sing ring from somewhere? Anything is possible!
No Cocaine for Kevin Feige
The trailer concludes with a fun little jump back to Wade’s birthday, as he and Leslie Uggams’ Blind Al crack a joke about doing some coke together… or at least they would, but apparently Marvel Studios’ head honcho Kevin Feige drew the line at illicit drug use when they made it over to Disney, no matter how many pseudonyms they go through. Womp womp.
This is a very fun trailer, and while we learn a little more about what to expect from Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s not like we really actually learn more than we could already surmise from the first trailer. Deadpool has his mission to save the multiverse, he has his ally in some version of Wolverine, and we have at least some of his adversaries that could stop them along the way, like Alioth and Cassandra Nova. But what else is in store beyond cracking jokes about the Fox-Disney merger?
Image: Disney
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