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In a couple of previous essays we've looked at the notion of "canon" and how modern western interpretations of it are ridiculous. In these I've had to use examples of hypothetical changes to movies, like a future Terminator that makes Rise of the Machines "canon" again despite it being "non-canon" now. After being dragged to Deadpool and Wolverine I think that we have a movie which has (I think somewhat intentionally) made many of the same points. Of course, to talk about this I need to discuss the movie at length, and to discuss it I need to discuss many other Marvel comic movies, so LOTS OF SPOILERS TO FOLLOW. You have been warned.
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Okay, from this point onwards I am assuming that you saw the movie, or at least got a plot synposis of it. I'm serious about this, last warning.
Now Deadpool is a very meta character, and so the Deadpool movies have always had meta aspects to them. Deadpool and Wolverine does this even moreso than the previous two. Those mainly had Deadpool cracking wise and had a much more comedic and irreverant tone than what was standard for X-Men movies, but they basically functioned as super hero plots. Deadpool and Wolverine is very much a commmentary on the X-Men franchise, the superhero movies made by Fox, and the state of affairs of Disney gobbling everything else up. It's not exactly subtle about any of this, and I think anyone who was paying attention to super hero movies in the last two decades would pick up on it immediately. In fact, it leans so hard into this that the plot barely functions except as a metaphor for the real life industry.
Let's get into some specifics. The main crux of the plot is the fact that Deadpool's universe is going to end because it's lost its "anchor being" which is Wolverine, who died in Logan. Without an anchor being to sustain it, the timeline will perish. On its own merits this is nonsense. The timeline was fine for millions of years before Wolverine existed, and it is stressed that it was not destroyed with the death of Wolverine but instead is being destroyed in the future which is "going backwards through meta-time" and will "eventually" reach the present (time travel tense trouble.) So if we accept "anchor beings" as things, then clearly it's enough for such a being to have existed at some point, at least if they are mortal. It's not like most "anchor being" candidates wouldn't eventually die of old age anyway. But we as the audience know exactly what is really being said: the Fox superhero franchise hasn't pumped out anything worthwhile since Logan, meaning that Hugh Jackman is the anchor that holds the franchise together. It didn't die immedaitely, but instead will die in the future after that point (i.e. when Fox got bought out.) While the movie isn't explicit about this, we might easily view the timeline destroy future backwards as Disney retconning movies out of existence, starting with the unpopular ones.
Let's take another example. The middle arc of the movie takes place in "The Void" where things are sent when they are forgotten. Deadpool and Wolverine encounter many previous movie heroes here, like Blade, the Chris Evans version of Johnny Storm, and the Jennifer Garner version of Elektra. There is even a Channing Tatum version of Gambit. They talk about being "forgotten" and "not getting an ending", which would be weird and petty for heroes. Gambit even talks about thinking that he was born in the void, which goes against everything we are told about the void (stuff gets sent there and destroyed, but nothing is created there.) Again, as the audience we know what this is really about. The void is serving as a metaphor for all the movies and actors who were abandoned by studios for being unpopular or due to Fox losing the rights to Disney. Only the main villain was "forgotten" in a convential, in-universe way. Everyone else (including many cameos) was only "forgotten" because they haven't been in movies for a long time. The heroes want an ending because their franchises got cut short. Gambit isn't sure if he ever was even alive because Channing Tatum never actually played Gambit. Instead, he was promised the role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (only to be replaced due to scheduling issues) and then later again in a standalone Gambit movie (which never got made.) So he was never "real" in the first place, as he didn't have a movie.
All of this is sort of self-indulgent, but it works here because of the no fourth wall nature of Deadpool and the fact that the movie is a send off of the Fox franchise. In fact, the movie itself is doing what its characters are doing in the universe: now that Disney owns Fox, and Fox's movies are troublesome to adapt for the MCU for many reasons, it's most convenient for them to just say that it all never "really" happened. Just as how the first villain int the movie isn't content to let the universe die a slow death (due to unpopularity after Jackman's departure) but instead wants to get rid of it immediately (as would be done in a corporate decree that that it is "non-canon.") The heroes are fighting to make sure that the universe is preserved (corresponding to preserving the interest in the old Fox movies.) They first do this by getting a new Wolverine/Jackman, but since this isn't the same one (as that one died and fans won't accept a retcon), their universe is still in peril. It's only by risking a sacrifice of Deadpool and Wolverine that they manage to preserve its existence long term, just as how making this movie dedicated to preserving what Disney would rather see destroys risks Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman never getting hired by Disney.
Of course since the movie did so well, and the other MCU movies are doing so bad, it is likely that Reynolds will get to continue. But even this movie makes clear that it is in the MCU "multiverse." (The presrvation gambit makes the Fox movies part of the same "multiverse" too.) So future endeavours will be firmly in Disney canon.
All of this is pretty clever on the makers of Deadpool and Wolverine, and that's not getting into the legimate, super hero scenes they fit in to remind the audience of why they actually like superhero movies, along with scenes openly poking fun at how ridiculously convoluted the "canon" of the Disney MCU franchise has become. While the movie isn't exactly high art or anything, it does manage to do quite a lot.
But what does that have to do with "canon" in general? Well, let's look to see how this movie fits into notions of canon. If we say "Disney says this is canonical, so it's canon" and use that to mean "all of the stuff 'really' happened", things get pretty ridiculous pretty fast. To start with, in the opening scene Deadpool digs up Wolverine's grave and desecrates his corpse. The audience understands what this is about, especially since Deadpool gives a narration that actually outright states the real world meaning. The movie is aware that movie Wolverine's arc is over, and to bring him back (for a Deadpool movie of all things) is going to be disrespectful no matter how you do it. So they are going to do things as disrespectfully as possible for laughs. On a larger level, this is part of the movie's "deconstruction/reconstruction" story, where the idea of Wolverine as a character is mocked early on, only to give an actual arc to an alternate version of Wolverine, while having other characters posthumously affirm the arc of the original.
Okay, but that's just the clear intention of the film as a meta-commentary. What does this scene mean if we blindly say "this is canon?" Well, that takes place in the future, after Logan, and there is no other film retconning Deadpool's actions. So this means that it "actually" happened. That is, everytime that you watch Logan and see Wolverine get buried, you have to think that shortly after that scene Deadpool is going to come from the past and dig up the corpse for goofy shenanigans. Now obviously this is not what the movie creators intended, especially with how much respect they give to the film Logan later on, but it is what a blind and naive adherance to "canon" would mean. In the same way Johnny Storm comes back from the Fantastic Four movies as a joke (i.e. that since it's Chris Evans you think this is going to be Captain America, but no it's another super hero that you forgot he played before that.) Because he has a joke role, and because Chris Evans is an expensive actor, he dies pretty quickly and horribly as a punchline (in contrast to other returning characters.) If we treat this movie as "canon" for all movies that it touches on, this means that if you rewatch the old Fantastic Four film you have to believe that Johnny Storm is going to be banished to the void by time cops due to a "anchor being" in his universe dying, and that he will eventually get brutally killed. Indeed, nerds have already updated various wikis relating to this version of the character to say exactly that. Now I doubt even the creators of Deadpool and Wolverine intended this, but it is now "canon."
Speaking of anchor beings, we have to take those seriously too if all of this is "canon." The time cops clearly said that every timeline has an anchor being, so that would include the main MCU timeline. Fans are already speculating on who it could be, and that whoever it is the whole movie franchise could come to an end once that anchor being dies. (The more cynical are saying that it was Iron Man, and since he already died on screen this explains why recent MCU movies suck.) Others insist that it must be someone else who is "still alive" and thus the universe is safe for the time being. I put "still alive" in quotes because when you are dealing with the whole timeline and both time and multiverse travel are options, then there is no global "now." Deadpool and Wolverine even makes it clear that Deadpool's universe is in trouble even at the time that the movie takes place, even though it also makes clear that the main action is before the events of Logan, and hence at the time of the movie Wolverine is still alive. He's just dead some years in the future, and even that is enough for the universe to reset. This means that if the "anchor being" for the MCU is not immortal, then the timeline is already decaying due to that anchor being dying (of old age or otherwise) in the future. It doesn't matter that we haven't seen this on screen, it still would happen in the timeline, and that's all that should matter in universe.
Now quite frankly this discussion is stupid. Nothing about this concept makes sense in-universe. The only way that the concept of "anchor being" makes sense is as an out of universe commentary on the popularity of certain actors. This works in something as irreverant and meta as Deadpool, but not in the mainstream MCU (at least not if those movies expect us to take them seriously at all.) It would be the easiest thing in the world to say that Deadpool and Wolverine is a side story that uses the same characters but is not "canon" for anything outside of it. This is in fact the natural way to watch the movies, even if you aren't a nerd. That's how the Deadpool movies affected the mainline X-Men movies already; theoretically they were in the same universe but there was functionally no interaction between them. Yet if you are shackled to modern notions of canon you have to accept that Deadpool and Wolverine is canon for the mainline MCU, since Disney owns both and has had characters from their Loki show come over into the movie. You have to accept this even though Deadpool explicitly talks about how dumb the multiverse concept is in the movie itself. It sometimes feels like part of the movie is a prank played by Ryan Reynolds on Disney.
The modern sense of "canon" really has broken the brains of many in the audience. I recently saw someone watch the Guillermo del Toro Hellboy and start with the question "just so that I can understand this, which franchise is it a part of?" The thought that it was a standalone film (based on a comic book franchises unrelated to the Marvel and DC universes) was not something that he could easily process. But that's how the Hellboy film expects you to process it; you don't need any prior knowledge of anything to enjoy and understand it. It's all there, because it's a self-contained story, not another checkmark on a multiverse plan. The thing is, the same applies to most of the movies that are now in the MCU. Due to Deadpool and Wolverine, both the original X-Men film and the original Iron Man film are in the same "franchise" or "multiverse." But does this mean that in order to fully appreciate X-Men you must think "you know, at the same time this is happening, there's another universe in the multiverse where Tony Stark is going to become a superhero" or "this Professor X only deals with mutants, but there's another alternate universe version of him who is part of an council of super heroes with a version of Doctor Strange that turns to evil"? Of course not, and if you were told about those things on the first viewing of X-Men it could only harm your enjoyment of the film. It's obvious that none of these "canonical" facts are relevant to the film. Yet this is how modern audiences have been trained to consume media.
Note too that Disney may very well sell either part or all of its superhero franchises, especially since in recent years everything other than Deadpool and Wolverine and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 have been total flops. (It can't be stressed enough that Deadpool and Wolverine explicitly says that the multiverse is dumb. You can't prop up a franchise using a gimmick that one of the few recently successful flicks said was idiotic.) If this happens for X-Men, it is likely that the new owners will sever their products from the MCU entirely. After all, the only one that even hinted at a relationship was a Deadpool movie, and all three of those films have elements which do not jive with the rest of the X-Men franchise anyway (played for comedy.) If you own X-Men, but someone else owns the rights to the MCU, then you need to sever ties to protect your investment. At that point all this talk of "anchor beings," timelines dying, the X-Men story being an offshot of the "sacred timeline," etc. It will be as if it never happened. If you keep to a blind adherence to canon then at the moment you must defend tooth and nail the idea that the X-Men movies were part of the MCU all along, only to immediately pivot and say that they never had anything to do with them after the rights are sold.
The solution is the obvious one: treat each story as its own thing. Stories may connect if the stories themselves make clear that this is happening, but that's the only way you develop a "canon." Canon is never developed by corporate decree or the whims of who owns the legal rights.
October 13, 2024