What you need to remember to understand Deadpool and Wolverine

Deadpool and Wolverine is a love letter to superhero films, namely the 20th Century Fox era of movies that came to an end when Disney acquired the studio in 2019.

There's references to Marvel of yesteryear as well as the current Marvel Cinematic Universe, but if you haven't kept track of every single film and TV show over the past decade then it might be hard to understand everything in the 2024 film. The same goes for if you didn't watch every classic superhero film, but that's where we come in.

For those that want to know more, or just need help remembering what happened in the movies of the early 2000s, here is what you need to remember for Deadpool and Wolverine. Warning this article contains some spoilers.

What you need to know for Deadpool and Wolverine if you haven't seen Loki

Deadpool and Wolverine's plot hinges quite heavily on the events of Disney+ series Loki, and if you haven't watched that then you'd be hard pressed to understand everything that takes place.

Ryan Reynolds' superhero is taken out of his timeline by the Time Variance Authority (or TVA), a group that are in charge of protecting the Sacred Timeline and who do so by monitoring it and all multiverses.

What is the sacred timeline, you say? It's the timeline in which all the Marvel movies have been taking place in, on Earth-616. As revealed in Loki, the sacred timeline was established by He Who Remains in order to ensure that his variants, aka Kang the Conqueror, don't wreak havoc across time and space.

The TVA help keep things in check by pruning variants that are a problem and risk destroying the sacred timeline, in the show this includes multiple versions of Loki like Tom Hiddleston's iteration and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). When they are pruned they are dumped into the Void, where they are eventually consumed by the being Alioth.

In Deadpool and Wolverine, the titular characters are sent to the Void and even encounter Alioth but they live to tell the tale thanks to a portal created using a ring from Doctor Strange.

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One new plot device that is introduced in the movie is the idea of an "anchor being", a person so important that if they die their whole timeline is slowly extinguished. For Deadpool's world this is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), specifically the iteration from the 20th Century Fox movies who dies at the end of Logan.

What you need to remember from the X-Men movies

With Wolverine playing such an important part in the movie it stands to reason that viewers will need to have some familiarity with the X-Men movies to understand Deadpool and Wolverine.

The character is, of course, not the Wolverine that we know and love. The film is very clear that it is honouring what happened in 2017's Logan by not bringing back that version of Wolverine. Instead we get a whole new variant who is said to be "the worst" one because he let down his world.

So, this Wolverine's backstory is slightly different to the one we know and is therefore new to the audience. But there are other nods to the past X-Men movies that viewers may not remember, namely because of the characters that appear.

In the film, Deadpool and Wolverine meet Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) and her followers, variants of various X-Men characters who were also left in the Void. This includes Pyro (Aaron Stanford) who appeared in X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand, the fire wielder was a student at Xavier's School for the Gifted before switching sides and joining Magneto (Ian McKellen).

Then there's Sabretooth, a member of Magneto's crew who Wolverine first fights at the beginning of 2000's X-Men. The team face the villain a few times over the course of the movie, but given that was almost a quarter of a century ago you'd be forgiven for forgetting about him.

Sabretooth is also Wolverine's half brother, this is referenced in Deadpool 3 but was only acknowledged in X-Men Origins: Wolverine when the character was played by Liev Schreiber.

There are also characters without any lines who appear in the film that once appeared in X-Men movies, including Toad, who appeared in 2000's X-Men, Lady Deathstrike who worked for William Stryker in X2, and Azazel who was a character in the 2011 prequel X-Men: First Class.

What you need to remember from other 20th Century Fox and Marvel movies

This sections gets into the nitty gritty of the superhero movies of the past, but it all links to the many cameos that Deadpool and Wolverine has including Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes), and X-23, aka Laura (Dafne Keen). For the non-fanatical superhero movie fan it might not mean much to see these characters on the big screen, so you might need to know more.

Here's the basics: Elektra is from 2003's Daredevil, the poorly-received superhero film starring Ben Affleck as the titular blind lawyer turned vigilante, and her titular 2005 movie. Elektra is an assassin who wields sai and was last seen saving a father and daughter from being killed by a supervillain organisation known as the Hand.

Blade is a vampire hunter, a human-vampire hybrid known as a Daywalker to be exact, who appeared in three films between 1998 and 2004. In Blade: Trinity the character killed Drake, aka Dracula, and continuing to fight another day — ironically the film stars Ryan Reynolds as vampire hunter Hannibal King, though this isn't referenced in the new Deadpool movie.

2017's Logan didn't come out that long ago, but for those who may not remember it centred on Logan helping Keen's Laura escape her creators and get to a place called Eden where mutants can be safe. While Logan died in the process he did protect Laura and give her the chance she needed to finally live her life.

Deadpool and Wolverine is streaming on Disney+ now