Deadpool & Wolverine made nearly $825 million at the box office after two weekends. It’s safe to say it’ll cross the $1 billion mark very soon. I’ve always believed Deadpool 3 would reach that milestone with ease now that Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is part of the MCU, and I wondered whether it could hit $2 billion during its entire theatrical run. Now that I have seen the movie, I think that’s definitely achievable, considering how well-thought out and fun the story is.
But, as with any other Marvel movie, Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t perfect. Some things do not make sense immediately. We have a few plot holes in Deadpool 3 that Marvel should address in the future.
Deadpool’s connection to Earth-616 is one of the things that both makes sense and is somewhat puzzling. And there’s a Spider-Man Easter egg in there that’s already confusing fans. Spoiler alert: it’s not the one you might have seen in the trailers or TV spots.
But, on that note, big spoilers will follow below, so make sure you watch Deadpool & Wolverine before you continue with this text
There’s one scene in the movie where Deadpool and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) are driving around in a car in the Void. One of them is seriously annoying the other. I’ll let you guess who is who.
At some point, Deadpool makes a few gestures with his hands as if he’s using Spidey’s web thingies while simultaneously producing matching sounds with his mouth. Wolverine hates it, of course. But it also tells us that Deadpool and Wolverine are very aware of who Spider-Man is.
You might think that we’re about to meet a Spider-Man variant in the Void, which would be amazing. We don’t get that sort of cameo. This isn’t the confusing Spider-Man Easter egg in Deadpool & Wolverine. I just wanted to get it out of the way.
Applying for the Avengers
The first big Spider-Man Easter egg comes early in the movie. Wade visits Earth-616 to apply for a job with the Avengers. He tells Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) that he needs the job, and we get a somewhat emotional moment as Happy explains that the Avengers don’t need to be superheroes. The world needs the Avengers.
As Happy says that, the camera pans to the various Avengers-related Easter eggs in Happy’s office. Right behind Deadpool, there’s a familiar picture on a shelf. It’s the one we get to see in Avengers: Endgame when Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) decides he has to invent time travel to help his fellow Avengers with the crazy Time Heist plan.
Spider-Man (Tom Holland) is essential for Tony’s decision. Iron Man has always blamed himself for losing the kid back on Titan. The Time Heist might give him a chance to bring Peter Parker back.
Back to the Deadpool & Wolverine Avengers interview scene, we only see half of the photo, the half that shows Tony Stark. A toy Iron Man mask is blocking the half where Tom Holland should be. Interestingly, this is the Iron May toy mask a kid wore in Iron Man 2. That kid is supposed to be a young Peter Parker.
Some Marvel fans have speculated online that Peter Parker isn’t shown in that picture because of what Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) did in No Way Home.
He made the entire Earth-616 forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. That only means the world forgot Spider-Man’s identity, not that Spider-Man has ceased to exist. The world knows there’s a Spider-Man, as we later learn in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
But that’s the wrong take because the events in No Way Home happen in the summer following the events in Endgame. The spell only applies from that point on.
While we still don’t know why Wade chose Earth-616 to apply for a job with the Avengers, we know it happened in mid-March 2018, several months before the events in Avengers: Infinity War. That’s several months before the blip that also “killed” Peter Parker.
No matter how strong Strange might be, the past can’t be really changed, considering what we learned in Infinity War and Endgame. So his spell can’t travel in time and change the past by making people forget who Peter Parker was in his early Spider-Man days.
Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t show us the full photo, as that would mean we’d have to see Tom Holland in a Marvel movie. Tom Holland plays Spider-Man, a character whose rights Sony controls.
Spider-Man has to appear in some sort of MCU project in the near future before Spider-Man 4. That’s the current Disney-Sony deal. Maybe it’ll happen in Daredevil. But he can’t show up in any other way in a Marvel movie. Not even in a photo? That’s right, not even, to paraphrase Iron Man.
