There is so much we still don’t know about Deadpool & Wolverine, thanks to the trailers doing an exceptional job of holding back many of its secrets, but if there’s one thing that has been made abundantly clear it’s that there will be no end to the Easter eggs, cameos, and crossovers to the Marvel movies of yesteryear.
Mostly Fox’s original X-Men movies, of course, but with Jennifer Garner confirmed to return as Daredevil‘s Elektra the door is open for other Marvel legacy characters, as we might call them, to drop by too. One of the MCU fandom’s biggest pie-in-the-sky hopes? That Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man could be among them.
That might seem a bit too much for the already stacked threequel to add to its plate, but the latest snippet of fresh Deadpool 3 footage definitely opens the door to some form of crossover with the Sam Raimi Spider-Verse. See if you can spot the big clue in the promo below:
Did you spot it? Don’t feel bad if you didn’t as you need to flip the screen to do so. The menu written on the window of the diner Wade and Wolvie are shown sitting in, once flipped, reveals that the diner is called Joe’s and uses a very familiar font — it’s the same font used by Joe’s Pizza, the NYC pizza parlor Peter Parker memorably worked for in Spider-Man 2!
Some are doubting this is an actual reference to Spider-Man 2, however. For starters, this is clearly a roadside diner and not the same inner-city restaurant Joe’s Pizzas was in that film. Not to mention that Joe’s is the most common name for an eating establishment there is!
Having said that, this is Deadpool & Wolverine we’re talking about, a film whose every shot we’ve seen so far has been marinated in Marvel lore and winks to the audience. There’s little chance that the set designers simply accidentally stumbled on the same name and font as Joe’s Pizzas from Spider-Man 2.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that scene takes place in the Raimiverse and that Maguire is about to join Wade and Logan at their table. However, this subtle nod to the OG Sony trilogy reminds us that Maguire is out there somewhere in the Marvel multiverse. Which may just set the stage for an actual team-up with Jackman’s Wolverine in Avengers: Secret Wars, if you believe the rumors (which we desperately want to).
Deadpool & Wolverine will unveil which of the many theories we have are fact or fiction when it hits cinemas on July 26.