Ever since Nick Fury introduced Tony Stark to the wider world of the MCU at the end of Iron Man, post-credit stings have become the definitive way for superhero movies to end.
So it should come as no surprise for those reading this that Deadpool 2 is no exception to the rule.
Of course with this being Deadpool they couldn’t do something as dull as introducing the next film in the X-Men series.
Instead the regenerating degenerate had some far more important business to take care of, namely fixing the broken X-Men timeline.
Deadpool’s first leap takes him back to the start of the movie to save his beloved Vanessa from the assassins who shot her.
However, it’s his next trip back that’s got fans excited. He goes back to meet Wolverine!
Well, technically he goes back to stop the biggest injustice that Deadpool has ever suffered, namely how he’s depicted in the awful X-Men Origins movie but it still counts.
During the hilarious scene, we see stock footage of Hugh Jackman in all his Wolverine glory confronting the mute Deadpool from Origins but rather than the two fighting like they do in the original scene the true Deadpool gets in the way.
The real Merc With A Mouth quickly lops off the head of his crappy counterpart before telling Wolverine that he’s ‘fixed that timeline’ and disappearing.
Deadpool then makes one final stop. In perhaps the film’s most meta moment Wade travels to pre-2008 when Ryan Reynolds was yet to hit the big time and shoots him before he can make Green Lantern.
It’s a hilarious joke but we’re pretty confident that by killing himself before he made the first Deadpool Wade effectively just wiped out all the changes he just made, meaning he never killed Ryan Reynolds.
Time travel is confusing…
Any way to get our head around the Merc With A Mouth’s time-hopping we spoke to the Deadpool 2 director, David Leitch, who cleared up a few things about the sting.
He said:
We actually came up with the [post-credit sting] mid-way through writing, we were circling around a bunch of ideas and I personally knew that I wanted to use the time travel device to revisit some things that I thought that the audience might really enjoy.
So I pitched Ryan the idea of let’s go back in time and revisit some of the fun scenes and change the whole movie and sort of pull the rug out on ourselves by changing the whole movie.
You know you spend the whole time building this movie and then you subvert it, it felt like classic Deadpool, you know you build up some real emotional stakes and then you go ‘whoop’ and you change it.
So Ryan latched on to the idea and we started to brainstorm where we could go back in time to and obviously saving Vanessa was key, Peter became an interesting plot device to go back to and then obviously Ryan had some personal grudges he wanted to deal with[laughs].
He wanted to go back to with the time machine and that was really fun when he came up with those ideas and I think we all thought we have to do that [return to Wolverine Origins] .
Time travel and alternate timelines have played an important role in the X-Men comics since the Age of Apocalypse story back in the nineties and it’s even bled through into the films.
In 2014 the X-Men first travelled back in time to avert the Days of Future Past timeline and the X-Men First Class story has always been oddly separate from the original film’s timeline.
Of course, when writing the new script for Deadpool the writers couldn’t resist poking some fun at the wonky parallel films at one point suggesting they take place in the McAvoy timeline before pulling the rug out from under fans.
David explained:
I think you’ll find that timelines are timelines in the ‘X-Men world’ but in the ‘Deadpool world’ we can have more fun with it and [laughs] I wouldn’t necessarily say that the [James McAvoy cameo] necessarily defines it because with one fourth wall break we can be in an entirely different timeline [laughs].
I’ll leave it to the fans to see where they think it lands but Deadpool sort of runs on its own in his own lane.
Deadpool 2 is in cinemas now!
