Warning: This article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.
If you were expecting Deadpool & Wolverine to fully integrate the X-Men into the MCU then you may leave the theater a tad disappointed, as the threequel — for all its faults — is impressively focused on the past and the present rather than doing too much heavy-lifting for Marvel’s future.
Sure, it opens the door for Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s Foxy friends to interact with the characters of Earth-616, but there’s no attempt to press a big old reset button, thereby setting up the X-Men reboot that’s already in the works. It’s ironic, then, that Deadpool 3 instead does DC a solid by helping pave the way for the Distinguished Competition’s next Batman.
As anyone obsessing over Deadpool & Wolverine will likely already know, Robert Pattinson may be returning for 2026’s The Batman — Part 2, but former Marvel man James Gunn is also working on a separate reboot for the Caped Crusader to be titled The Brave and the Bold. And, despite being in the wrong multiverse, Deadpool 3 just helped Gunn make a major decision for his Dark Knight.
Deadpool & Wolverine makes it abundantly clear what James Gunn needs to do with the DCU’s Batman
They kept us waiting, first 24 years and then the entire marketing campaign and then most of the film, but Deadpool & Wolverine finally goes and gives us Wolverine’s iconic helmet in its final act. At long last, Hugh Jackman dons the blue and yellow spiky-eared head-covering for the grand and bloody battle with the Deadpool Corps — and it looks just as glorious as we always hoped it would.
For X-Men fans long in the tooth, there’s something genuinely otherworldly about seeing the comic book-accurate Wolverine realized in live-action for the very first time. Somehow, even though it really shouldn’t, the full Logan look actually works perfectly in the flesh. Even with the addition of the white eyes, a fixture of superhero costumes that the movies have long seemed dead-set on avoiding.
Thankfully, the Deadpool franchise itself has given its hero white eyes — and proven how well they can work — since 2016, but weirdly other universes have been slow to follow suit. Since then, we’ve had two and a bit Batman movies (the two Justice Leagues make up one and a half) but none of them bothered to break with the Batverse’s most boring 35-year-old tradition: chickening out of giving the Dark Knight some white lenses in his cowl.
With Wolverine’s white-eyed helmet working out so beautifully in live-action, however, this really is the final proof that a similar take on Batman’s cowl in Gunn’s DCU is the only way to go. Come on, Gunn, it’s time to make sure the movie lives up to its name and be as brave and as bold as Marvel.