In the new “Deadpool & Wolverine,” two beloved superhero franchises will finally come together in a frenzy of irreverent jokes, gory action and Easter eggs. Drawing on decades of movie history and featuring a dizzying array of characters and references to past plots, it’s the kind of film that rewards longtime fans.
For those who haven’t seen the X-Men or Deadpool films in a while, here’s what you need to know before watching.
Before he got his own Deadpool movies, Ryan Reynolds debuted the character in the X-Men franchise, appearing in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” in 2009. The role didn’t go over well with fans — his mouth was sewn shut in the film — and Reynolds wanted a separate movie to explore the character more fully.
“Deadpool” (2016), the first of three films in the franchise, introduces Wade Wilson, a foul-mouthed mercenary who falls in love with a woman named Vanessa. After getting a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Wilson volunteers for a shadowy program that promises to heal him. There, he is tortured by the villainous Ajax until his body mutates and receives self-healing powers, similar to those possessed by Wolverine. Aided by an elderly sightless woman, Blind Al, and two other X-Men, Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Deadpool eventually hunts down Ajax and reconciles with Vanessa.
His relationship with Vanessa is short-lived, however, as “Deadpool 2” (2018) opens with her being killed by one of Wilson’s old mercenary targets. Grieving her loss, he joins the X-Men and works to stop a time-traveling soldier named Cable from killing a young mutant. In that film’s mid-credits scene, Wade uses Cable’s time-traveling device to journey through the past, reversing the death of his friends and the murder of Vanessa.
According to “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the self-healing mutant was born James Howlett in 1832. As a boy, he used his bone claws to kill his family’s groundskeeper, who is later revealed to be his biological father, Thomas Logan. James runs away and joins his half brother, nicknamed Sabretooth, as they fight in the American Civil War, the two World Wars and the Vietnam War. Eventually, James is recruited into Team X, a black-ops military unit, and adopts the alias Logan.
Logan volunteers for the secretive Weapon X program, in which he is injected with adamantium, an indestructible metal that bonded to his bones and gave him his claws. He later joins the X-Men, teaming up with professor Charles Xavier, the group’s founder. (Xavier’s telepathic twin sister is Cassanda Nova, who can be seen in the “Deadpool & Wolverine” trailer.)
In the Wolverine trilogy’s final installment, “Logan,” he lives in exile, working as a limousine driver and caring for 97-year-old Xavier. His body is aging and no longer heals as well as it once did. He meets a young mutant girl named Laura (Dafne Keen), who has his self-healing and claw powers and was created as X-23 in a secretive lab using his DNA — making her Logan’s daughter.
After she escapes from the lab, Logan is tasked with taking her to North Dakota while trying to evade the paramilitary group that wants to recapture her. The film ends with Logan being poisoned by adamantium and dying in a fight to save Laura and other mutant children.
First introduced in the two seasons of the Disney+ series “Loki,” the TVA, a huge bureaucratic agency, safeguards what’s known as the Sacred Timeline. That means pruning or eliminating people who don’t fulfill their fate and who mess with the flow of history. They end up in the Void, a no man’s land where a giant purple storm monster called Alioth devours all matter.
The existence of the TVA also coincides with the MCU’s foray into the Multiverse, in which multiple parallel timelines exist, with different variants of the same character. Many characters, including Deadpool, can also move between timelines and can meet their own variants, and produce further chaos. Based on the trailer, it’s safe to say that the film will feature numerous variants of both Deadpool and Wolverine, including Ladypool and Dogpool.
Before Disney, the parent of Marvel Studios, acquired 21st Century Fox, it did not have the rights to the X-Men characters, including Deadpool and Wolverine. That meant neither could appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But after the 2019 merger, both superheroes — and a host of other X-Men — could be integrated into the MCU, meaning they can now interact with the TVA, Loki, Doctor Strange and other familiar characters.
Within Marvel’s multiverse concept, the Fox X-Men franchise will probably be treated as a separate universe (Earth 10005) from the one inhabited by Captain America and Iron Man (Earth 616), but characters will now be able to jump between the two. Expect this film, and most future Marvel movies, to be rich with cameos.