Deadpool Completely Destroyed By Marvel Studios

If the trailer is anything to go by, it looks like Disney is fully entrenching Deadpool in all of its canonical multiverse bs. Not only is the TVA from Loki featured heavily, but fans are already scouring the trailer for easter eggs and connections to the MCU as a whole. One example is the copy of Secret Wars #5 that’s visible in the trailer for like five seconds.

That quick shot has already spawned several speculative articles asking if it’s a reference to Marvel’s upcoming Secret Wars movie. Let’s compare that with the hype around the original Deadpool (2016). Everyone who saw the trailer for the first film was super excited to see Ryan Renolds shooting thugs while tossing off one-liners like an R-rated Spider-Man. Not one person went through that trailer frame by frame trying to figure out if it would lead into the next X-Men movie.

That’s because prior to Deadpool’s migration to Marvel following Disney’s 20th Century Fox acquisition, the canonicity of the character and his films was questionable. Yes, Deadpool and Deadpool 2 technically take place in Fox’s X-Men universe, but not in any meaningful way. When the entire X-Men cast shows up for a two-second gag in Deadpool 2, we, as the audience, aren’t supposed to take it as literally occurring in X-Men continuity.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix, the first X-film after DP2, doesn’t feature a scene where everyone reminisces about the time they hid from Wade Wilson because nothing in Deadpool is meant to be taken seriously. Or at least, that’s how it used to be. Now that Deadpool is officially a Marvel Studios property, his #1 goal as a character is no longer simply to make us laugh but also to tie up loose ends and establish new lore.

Deadpool & Wolverine will still be full of off-color, raunchy jokes, and plenty of profanity—Marvel isn’t stupid—but like every other MCU film, it will also assign a certain percentage of its runtime to set up further Marvel projects down the line. Because let’s not forget Kevin Feige’s Marvel considers everything part of the same story. Even What If?, a project that by its very nature would seem to necessitate that all of its stories take place outside of mainstream Marvel continuity, ended up being canon, thanks to the multiverse.

Comic book purists will no doubt point out that, for the most part, Deadpool’s wacky shenanigans have always been canon in Marvel comics. Especially since he didn’t start out as a fourth-wall-breaking nutjob but rather a lazy ripoff of DC’s Deathstroke. And that’s great for the comics, but we would argue that the movie Deadpool was a whole other beast entirely.

Deadpool and Deadpool 2 felt more like parodies rather than straight-ahead superhero movies. Deadpool 2 even went through all the trouble of introducing X-Force just for a gag where they all die. X-Force is a pretty big deal in the comics, just to be thrown away for a cheap laugh. But that’s exactly why it’s funny.

Deadpool & Wolverine, on the other hand, based on the trailer, feels like just another Marvel movie, albeit a self-aware one. And when it comes down to it, making Deadpool just another part of the greater MCU is the worst thing that could ever happen to the character.

Bottom line: fans should have come away from the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer talking about how weird it is having a pegging joke in a Marvel Studios film. Instead, all of the trailer discourse revolved around Easter Eggs. “Was that Doctor Doom? Is one scene set during Avengers: Age of Ultron? Hey, that’s a copy of Secret Wars!”