Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to join Deadpool 3 for MCU debut
The biggest news to come across our screens recently is that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine will be joining Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool for their official MCU debut in Deadpool 3. The announcement was made through a video on Ryan Reynold’s YouTube channel.
I’ve touched on how messy Intellectual Property and licensing can cause a mess of things in media – movies, TV shows, video games, etc – which also played into why the X-Men and the other Marvel Universe characters never interacted with each other on screen until recently. Before Marvel got its act together, the company preferred to license out their properties to other companies. Sony had Spider-Man, 20th Century Fox had X-Men, etc. It took a long while for these iconic characters to join the likes of Iron Man, the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the rest of the MCU due to licensing issues, even though Marvel technically owned the rights to all of those characters and stories. Eventually, Spider-Man came aboard after Sony decided to work a deal with Marvel/Disney, and of course, 20th Century Fox (which became 21st Century Fox in 2013) was bought by Disney outright. And now the Deadpool character and the X-Men characters can appear in the same movies as other Marvel characters!
So, what about that movie Logan?
If you haven’t watched Logan, this is a good time for you to get off this ride and go watch it. We’ll be heading into spoiler territory from here on.
In another video, both Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds talk about Logan, because we all thought Logan was the end of the Wolverine story, at least the one starring Hugh Jackman. Even though it technically happened in another ‘universe’ (if we consider the Marvel Cinematic Universe as another universe in of itself) it shouldn’t really play a role in the MCU, right? But that gets kind of confusing for a viewer who might not know the intricacies of why Wolverine, a Marvel Comics character, cannot appear in a Marvel movie, or whatever, especially if Hugh Jackman is playing Wolverine again (“but it’s a different Wolverine!” you might try to explain). Anyways, the short of it is, they are not touching the Logan movie. The events happened. It will stay ‘happened’. However, the movie takes place a few years in the future (2029, according to Ryan Reynolds, and he’s always right), and so that means there are a few years before that and the current point in the MCU timeline that they can play in. Hurray?
Some people were born to play certain roles: Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool (Merc with a Mouth), RDJ as Iron Man, Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther, and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. It'll be difficult to imagine those characters as someone else. Honorable mention to Patrick Stewart as Xavier, though he was great in other roles too such as his famous one on Star Trek.
Deadpool 3 is set to come out September 6th, 2024.
