The Deadpool 3 trailer had so much to live up to, after — well — years of hype. Thankfully, the first look at the film that we must now refer to as Deadpool & Wolverine definitely delivered. Showing admirable restraint, the trailer still keeps a lot close to its chest, as well as offering a tantalizing flavor of Deadpool joining the MCU at long last and the most artful semi-glimpses at Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine return.
So, no, while there was no Fantastic Four casting announcement, the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer didn’t disappoint. It’s also much denser than it might appear on first viewing as there’s a lot to unpack in its 2:25 minute length that helps us know what to expect on July 26. Like the man says, your little cinematic universe is about to change forever…
Deadpool’s F&F-style family
As it’s been six years (!) since the last DP movie, and they only make one-shot-each cameos in the trailer, you might be struggling to identify all of those attending Wade Wilson’s birthday party in the promo’s first clip. The Fast & Furious-style extended family to Wade’s Dominic Torretto are Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), Dopinder (Karan Soni), Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna), Blind Al (Leslie Uggams), and Peter (Rob Delaney). The one who you really might be struggling to remember (the bearded fellow on the right of the above image) is Buck (Randal Reeder), who played a minor role in Deadpool 2 and has apparently become a big part of Wade’s life since then.
Agent Paradox
Fresh off his success in Succession, Matthew Macfadyen is making his MCU debut in Deadpool 3, and the trailer finally reveals who he’s playing. It’s Agent Paradox, an analyst for the TVA who seems to be making a special project of Deadpool much like Mobius did with Loki. He definitely seems like an old-school TVA agent — as in, from before they discovered they had free will — so this raises questions about DP3‘s place in the timeline. This is a much more faithful adaptation of Paradox, who was already loosely brought to the screen as General Dox in Loki season 2.
TVA flashbacks
Again evoking Loki season 1, Agent Paradox brings DP up to speed with the MCU by basically showing him the Marvel Studios Legends clip show, much like Mobius fast-forwarded Loki through Phases Two and Three. The movies showcased are Avengers: Age of Ultron (Iron Man landing and the epic team entrance shot), Thor: Ragnarok (Thor glowing with lightning), and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Wade salutes at the sight of Cap’s shield).
Cassandra Nova
In this context, the glimpse at a mysterious bald person might immediately make you think of Professor X, but we’re pretty sure said follically challenged individual is the threequel’s villain, as played by The Crown‘s Emma Corrin. Corrin has long been believed to be playing Cassandra Nova, something that the shot at her shaved cranium seems to confirm. Nova is a complicated character to summarize, but basically she’s Charles Xavier’s evil telepathic twin sister, so she could easily be the most dangerous foe DP has yet to face.
White Suit Wolverine
For a trailer announcing the title Deadpool & Wolverine, it has a remarkable lack of Wolverine footage. However, aside from the final shadow (which I’ll get to in a minute), we also get this curious glimpse at DP approaching an unusually dressed Wolverine in some kind of shady club. In fact, if it wasn’t for the hair, we’d never assume this white-suited man was Logan.
What this shot seems to reveal is that Logan will operate as Patch, his criminal alter ego from the comics, in the film. To root out the bad guys, Wolvie sometimes dons a white suit and a new identity and operates out of Madripoor. So this scene is likely set in Madripoor, the island city previously introduced in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Doctor Doom, is that you?
OK, so you likely didn’t miss the significance of the guy with the metal mask and the green hood in this trailer, but let’s go over it all the same. So who is this Victor Von Doom-lookalike who wields a circular weapon that looks like the logo for Christopher Nolan’s Syncopy company? Well, I’m pretty confident that it’s not Doom himself, as everything about this person from the neck down seems much too lo-fi for the ruler of Latveria, although their mask does closely resemble the Toby Kebbel version from 2015’s Fant4stic. As this person dwells in the wasteland that appears to be some kind of dystopian Mad Max version of the Fox-verse, they may have scavenged some tech from Kebbel’s Doom.
Pyro
No, we don’t get a teaser of a Taylor Swift cameo in the trailer, nor Halle Berry or Patrick Stewart or any of the Fox-verse cameos that have been rumored. Hilariously, though, the trailer goes and spoils a cameo that had totally passed us by. Aaron Stanford turns up as John Allerdyce aka Pyro, a character not seen since 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand.
His outfit is a neat, Mad Max-fied update of his classic comic book costume. Just days before the trailer came out, Stanford was playing coy about a Marvel return, in what we now know was one of the MCU acting performances of the year.
Secret Wars #5
The award for the sneakiest Easter Egg in the trailer, however, goes to the teaser’s final shot. Although naturally our attentions are focused on the spiky-haired hero who’s about to sink his claws into Deadpool’s midriff, if you manage to pull your eyes away from the Multiverse Saga’s biggest team-up so far, you may notice a curious item on the far left of the screen. That item just happens to be a very tatty copy of Secret Wars #5, part of the original 1984 comic book event that will of course inspire 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars. Fans had been thinking of Deadpool 3 as almost a Secret Wars #0 (the Civil War to SW‘s Infinity War) and this easily missed visual gag seems to clinch the deal.