‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ ticks 8 big boxes to give MCU its deadline only to dead drop the ball at the last minute

Post Endgame, MCU has been running haphazardly, failing to stick a landing and find a path it can set its characters down. Like the dozen Marvel films before it, Deadpool & Wolverine was going to bring the MCU back — Deadpool was indeed supposed to be “Marvel Jesus.” And the film is one for a while, hyping hope for a future until it all gets mockingly dashed at the last possible moment.

Warning: The article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.

Let’s tick it all off on our fingers — creating a fear of the mystical source where the Ten Rings came from didn’t work, connecting it to Ms. Marvel’s bangle didn’t, Arishem is barely terrifying, Kang fizzled out before Jonathan Majors got shown the door, the Skrull invasion was a mess, and Wanda…well, that hero-then villain- then hero- again villain trajectory still hurts.

MCU needs a big crisis on the horizon now, just like Thanos started making his presence felt as early as The Avengers. We need a crisis that justifies this sudden onslaught of new superheroes and what would bring together these disjointed realities. Creating suspense is one thing, appearing as if you have no clue what you plan to do is another.

And Deadpool 3 could have corrected this meandering course.

It, as the headline says, did tick all the right boxes to rig a ticking time bomb so big that mutants, superheroes, and gods would have to join forces — if the Sacred Timeline was crawling towards its end. The breadcrumbs for the possibility were all there:

• It is set after Loki season 2 when the “new” TVA is still finding its path.
• There are rogue officials, with insane ideas, still set in their old ways of ruling the TVA and bringing discipline through destruction.
• It clearly happens very soon after Loki, which leaves the path open for scheming officials like Paradox as the likes of Ouroboros and Mobius are too busy to notice.
• The plan to add selected people from dying timelines to the Sacred Timeline – weren’t we told beings can’t stay in a timeline not their own and if they do, it might cause an incursion?
• The introduction of the concept of Anchor Beings – their timelines are reliant on their existence to continue surviving.
• An example of how a timeline’s most aware saviors won’t know when their branch starts dying.
• How, technically, one person alone can’t reverse this impending doom.
• The problem can be solved if two mutants combine their powers to subdue it — which means mutants are important for this.

All Deadpool & Wolverine needed to maybe show in the middle of all the chaos of saving Pool’s timeline and the drama he riled up, no one is looking at the Sacred Timeline that is steadily climbing towards its demise since its Anchor Being is dead. After all, so many crucial heroes have died so far — they were important to keep Earth-616 safe, who is to say one of them wasn’t crucial to ensure it remains alive and kicking?

But no, no, no, no. all this setup, the hint that the plan of overburdening the Sacred Timeline exists, the running plot of “Oh, we have to keep the Sacred Timeline safe,” and the whole concept of Anchor Beings was simply added so Wolverine could have his fancy MCU indoctrination. This could easily have been the next MCU crisis — a dead Anchor Being who is maybe not present in any other timeline (so no replacements) and rapidly devolving Sacred timeline, which would send every other branch timeline into a death spin, thus forcing different heroes from a number of timelines to join forces.

Even as Pool entered the TVA in the post-credits scene to temper with the footage of Human Torch telling him about Cassandra Nova, we hoped that a spare screen monitoring the Scared Timeline would show its gradual decline and give the film more meaning than giving Deadpool the partial-Wanda treatment, usherin Logan into the franchise, and turning the kindest character from the last two films into a villain. Deadpool & Wolverine had many, many missed opportunities, but there is no dethroning this sucker punch.