Warning: this blog contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine – if you want to avoid them, stop reading now!
The 20th Century Fox era of Marvel Movies is officially over, but what comes next?
After successfully ensuring that his timeline didn’t get obliterated by rogue TVA agent Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), Wade Wilson settled back into life in Earth-10005, making it a new home for the Wolverine variant he learned to love along the way.
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Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige has suggested that Deadpool & Wolverine is below only Infinity War and Endgame in terms of how crucial it is for the MCU going forward. But the story ends in the same timeline where it began, with no suggestion of how the Merc with a Mouth is going to end up an Avenger in Earth-616 – it’s a send-off for one era, but it doesn’t offer many clues about the impending Marvel phase Deadpool is expected to play a big part in.
However, we’re going to be good sports and take Feige at his word here, which means it’s time to overanalyse the few moments which appear to offer hints about what the future might hold…
Deadpool and Thor?
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Mr. Paradox aims to recruit Deadpool for his timeline destroying mission by preying on one of his biggest vulnerabilities; his aching desire to be considered a serious hero. Offered a lifeline to join the Avengers, he catches a glimpse of a TV screen which appears to show a future, sombre moment on the battlefield between him and the God of Thunder.
Naturally, this plan was never going to work out the second that Wade refused to assist in the mercy killing of entire timelines, and definitely wouldn’t be rectified after he managed to save his own, realising that his personal relationships were far more important than the super friendships he imagined. But that doesn’t change the fact that we saw Deadpool and Thor fighting together.
Well, it does; eagle-eyed viewers will spot that that’s footage from Thor: The Dark World, digitally altered so Ryan Reynolds’ character takes the place of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. As this appeared on a TVA screen, it was almost definitely a glimpse at an alternate past mischievously highlighted to manipulate Wade into thinking it was an alternate future.
Secret, Secret Wars?
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However, let’s have some fun and throw out an alternate theory. Chris Hemsworth is heavily rumoured to appear in 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, which if it stays reasonably faithful to the source material, will see the Avengers and the X-Men in different fighting factions on the remote Battleworld.
Is this a glimpse of a particularly tense moment where Wade is particularly badly injured when facing off against supervillains? Or, more intriguingly, is it setting the stage for a fourth Deadpool movie directly inspired by the comic book Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars, which revealed Deadpool was also present on the battlefield, but nobody could remember he was there?
That would be a great way of ensuring the bloody, R-rated chaos of a Deadpool movie wouldn’t be sanitised by placing him within a more family-friendly Avengers movie, letting him play with the A-list heroes whilst ensuring the fourth wall remained intact in the Secret Wars movie. It would certainly help the writers get around the current problem of him not sharing the same timeline.
The only Blade?
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I don’t need to run through the cameos here – if you’ve seen the movie, you’re hardly clicking onto a spoiler blog to be reminded that Elektra and Johnny Storm were there. However, a cheeky fourth-wall breaking gag involving Wesley Snipes’ Blade could be interpreted as a soft launch of Marvel reconsidering their plans for the character.
Snipes’ character yells that he is the one and only Blade that there will ever be: cue Deadpool looking directly into the camera. However, this doesn’t play like an acknowledgement that Mahershala Ali is waiting in the wings so much as it seems to be poking fun at the fact that movie – initially announced all the way back in 2019 – has fallen behind schedule, going through several rounds of rewrites, and having numerous directors exit the project over creative differences.
The MCU’s Blade is still slated to release in November 2025, but there’s no director currently attached to the project, and rumours have been circulating for years that Ali has grown frustrated with how it’s not taking shape. According to one bombshell Hollywood Reporter article, each new script has completely changed which era the story is set in, going from the 1920s to the present day in subsequent drafts.
Ali was introduced via an uncredited voice cameo in the post-credits sequence of Eternals, but as the studio seemingly has no plans to bring those characters back, could they soon cut their losses and give up trying to resurrect Blade alongside them? File this one under “this author may be reading too much into a dumb joke”, but hey, that’s what spoiler blogs are for!
Who are they?
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Alongside the returning appearances of Fox-era heroes, Channing Tatum appears as Gambit, and very briefly, Henry Cavill cameos as a variant of Wolverine from another timeline. Neither has appeared in the MCU before, so you’ll be forgiven if you’re feeling a bit confused as to why they’ve shown up.
In the case of Cavill, his appearance is identical to that of John Krasinski turning up as Reed Richards in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. He was fancast as Wolverine online, and producers at Marvel have taken notice, giving fans a brief glimpse into what he would look like taking over from Hugh Jackman.
Alas, as Deadpool himself jokes, Marvel will likely be getting Hugh to play Logan until he’s 90, so this is nothing more than a cheeky nod for the true die-hard fans. As for the other X-Man, Gambit, Tatum first signed on to play the Cajun card dealer back in May 2014 (several years after he was first rumoured to play him) and began promoting the solo movie at Comic Con in 2015.
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However, it got stuck in development hell, changing directors several times over and eventually getting cancelled by Disney following the Fox merger in 2019. At the point of cancellation, the movie had a scheduled release date of March 13th, 2020 – so if it did enter production and arrive in cinemas as planned, it still would have been cursed by COVID shutting down cinemas worldwide mere days later.
Thankfully, a new lockdown hasn’t got in the way of us finally seeing Tatum’s take on the character – even if we can’t exactly hear anything he says particularly clearly. It’s the one what-if from the Fox era that needed to be tied up, meaning there’s no longer any need for us to look back.
