Warning: This post contains spoilers for Deadool & Wolverine.
Hugh Jackman’s beloved Wolverine isn’t the only mutant to show up in the third Deadpool movie. Deadpool & Wolverine is chock full of superhero cameos from the X-Men universe, Fantastic Four universe, and the Marvel cinematic universe.
How, exactly, all these disparate characters who have never shared a screen before wind up in the same place is rather complicated. As Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) himself explains in the fourth-wall-breaking movie, Disney merged with 20th Century Fox five years ago. Pre-merger, Disney—who owns Marvel Studios and their MCU—held the rights to the Avengers. Fox, meanwhile, had the rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four. As of 2019’s merger, Disney owns all the characters and has begun to fold the characters of X-Men and Fantastic Four into the MCU.
Deadpool & Wolverine is a love letter to the 20th Century Fox Marvel movies that are largely dead—or getting rebooted—post-merger. Early in the movie, Deadpool and Wolverine get banished to a place called The Void, a kind of dumping ground for comics characters at the end of space and time. There they run into several characters whose own movies were abandoned or never made. Deadpool & Wolverine offers those characters some closure. It even ends with a montage of behind-the-scenes footage from various X-Men and Fantastic Four movies with “Good Riddance” by Green Day, a classic graduation song.
Here are all the cameos you may have missed in Deadpool & Wolverine.
The Hulk
At the beginning of the movie, Deadpool goes universe-hopping to find a Wolverine who can help him save the universe. He encounters several different Logan variants across different timelines, including one who is fighting the Hulk. From the brief glimpse of the big green guy, we’d guess it’s Edward Norton from Marvel’s 2008 Hulk movie before the role was recast with Mark Ruffalo.
Henry Cavill as Wolverine
In a bit of fan service, Deadpool also runs across a version of Wolverine played by Henry Cavill. Cavill played Superman in the Warner Bros. DC Comics movies, though fans bemoaned the fact that reshoots on Justice League resulted in the post-production team having to digitally remove Cavill’s mustache with poor results. Deadpool cracks a joke about how Disney will treat Cavill better than that other studio did.
Chris Evans as The Human Torch
In case you were living under a rock for the 2010s, let me remind you that Chris Evans rose to superstardom playing Captain America in the Avengers movies. Many fans blame the recent MCU slump on the fact that Evans left the franchise after Avengers: Endgame.
So audiences, like Deadpool, were surely elated to see Evans finally return to the MCU. At first, Deadpool and Wolverine hear only his voice, then they see his chiseled jawline. But, in a hilarious twist, when Evans seems poised to utter the iconic phrase, “Avengers, assemble!” he instead calls out, “Flame on!” He catches on fire as he rises into the sky. Unfortunately the bad guys immediately extinguish his flame and he crashes down to earth.
The appearence is another wink at pre-MCU movie history. Before Evans was Captain America he played Johnny Storm, a.k.a. the Human Torch, in the Fantastic Four universe where his power was, well, setting himself on fire.
As he lies smoldering, Wolverine backs away, saying, “We don’t know that guy.”
“We thought we did,” Deadpool adds, a bit depressed.
Toad, Lady Deathstrike, Pryo, Colossus
The villain of the movie, Cassandra Nova, has recruited quite the crew of henchmen from past X-Men films. Among them are Toad (Ray Park) from X-Men, Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) from X-2: X-Men United, Pyro (Aaron Stanford) from X-Men: The Last Stand, and Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) from Deadpool.
Ant-Man’s corpse
Does this even really count as a cameo? Nova uses the corpse of a giant version of Ant-Man as her headquarters in The Void. Which Ant-Man, exactly, was sent to The Void and how he died, we do not know. But when Ant-Man’s skull is revealed, Deadpool cracks, “Paul Rudd finally aged.”
Tyler Mane’s Sabretooth
We’ve gotten two versions of Sabretooth in the Hugh Jackman Wolverine movies. Tyler Mane played the clawed villain in the first X-Men movie where he fought Wolverine on the top of the Statue of Liberty. Ultimately, Sabretooth lost that battle when Cyclops blasted him off the landmark with his laser vision.
Later, Liev Schreiber took over the role in the prequel film X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That film revealed that Sabretooth and Wolverine are half-brothers (though comics readers might take issue with that particular movie invention). But Origins got such bad reviews that most fans pretend it never happened. Indeed, Deadpool himself travels back in time in Deadpool 2 to kill off the version of his character that stars in that film.
Anyway, when Mane’s Sabretooth pops up in Deadpool & Wolverine, and Deadpool gleefully tells Wolverine that “people have waited decades for this fight,” he’s probably referring to the rematch from the original X-Men film.
Jennifer Garner as Elektra
While stuck in the void, Deadpool and Wolverine seek out other superheroes who have been banished to the no man’s land. One of the first characters they encounter is Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner in both Daredevil and her solo spinoff film, Elektra.
When she and her friends list off the various superheroes who Cassandra has murdered, they mention that Daredevil died. Longtime Marvel fans may remember that Ben Affleck, Garner’s now ex-husband, played that character.
“I’m so sorry,” Deadpool says to Elektra of Daredevil’s death.
“It’s fine,” Elektra says in a wink to the audience about the actors’ off-screen separation.
Wesley Snipes as Blade
Before there was Iron Man or Spider-Man or even the X-Men on the big screen, there was Blade. The vampire hunter played by Wesley Snipes arguably kicked off the era of modern comic book movies with his 1998 film.
After a long hiatus, Snipes is back. At one point in the film, he quips, “There’s only ever been one Blade. There only ever going to be one Blade.”
That line seems to be a reference to a cursed reboot of the Blade franchise. A new version of the film starring Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali was announced way back in 2019 but has yet to shoot a single scene. The movie has lost two different directors and reportedly been rewritten several times. When Black Panther director Ryan Coogler recently began production on his own vampire movie starring Michael B. Jordan, fans joked that Coogler was so fed up with the delay he decided to make his own Blade.
Do not fear, Blade fans: Snipes’ line seems to be a snarky comment, not a death knell. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige recently said that the Ali movie is still in the works and teased it will have an R-rating.
Channing Tatum as Gambit
Channing Tatum spent a decade trying to get a Gambit movie made. The actor fell in love with the Cajun thief from the X-Men franchise and co-wrote a screenplay that he’s described as an R-rated rom-com. But Gambit got stuck in development hell: Directors like Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Doug Liman (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) came and left the project. Finally, the Disney-Fox merger seemed to kill Tatum’s Gambit dreams…until now. Tatum’s version of Gambit bemoans the fact that he never got his own movie—his adventures were cut short before they even began.
The version that pops up in Deadpool & Wolverine is admittedly ridiculous. He is incomprehensible. Deadpool pillories Tatum for his poor accent work and frets over the audience missing important exposition. And his ability to make playing cards explode seems silly, until he starts blowing up bad guys.
Dafne Keene as X-23
Deadpool sets the tone for the movie early in its run. In a voiceover says the audience is probably wondering how they will resurrect Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine while still respecting his noble death at the end of 2017’s Logan. “We’re not,” Deadpool quips, before exhuming Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton and using his bones to brutally murder dozens of enemies.
But one character the movie does respect is X-23. In Logan, the character is played by Dafne Keene, a child who has been experimented on and given Wolverine’s DNA. (In the movies, she’s basically his clone or his daughter, depending on your perspective.) Wolverine ultimately sacrifices himself to save her.
In Deadpool & Wolverine she shows up largely to buck up Wolverine and tell him he’s capable of saving the world, despite his shameful past.
Blake Lively as Lady Deadpool
Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are one of Hollywood’s most enduring It Couples. They’ve been spotted hanging out with Taylor Swift backstage at her concerts and traveling to one another’s shoots so their family can stay together even as they work on their respective films. So it seemed only a matter of time until Lively cameoed in one of Reynolds’ action flicks. She finally does so as Lady Deadpool, the female version of the Merc With a Mouth.
Though we never see Lively’s face under the mask, there are several references to Lively throughout the film that hint she might appear. Early in the movie, Deadpool states there are 206 bones in the human body. “207 if I’m watching Gossip Girl,” he gleefully adds, referencing his wife’s breakout television series. Later when he’s groped during a fight, he yells, “I’m telling Blake!”
And Lady Deadpool herself is previewed by another adoring version of the Deadpool character. “She just had a baby, and you can’t even tell,” he says, referencing the child that Lively and Reynolds welcomed last year, their fourth. Finally, when Lady Deadpool does show up, she sports a long, high, blonde ponytail, just like the one that Lively herself wore to the premiere of the movie.