It has finally happened: Deadpool 3 is playing in theaters, and it’s an incredible movie. Deadpool & Wolverine is easily the best Marvel film since Avengers: Endgame. Yes, it’s even better than Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Without spoiling anything, I’ll say it packs tremendous action sequences peppered not only with the uncensored humor you’ve come to expect from Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), but also with a few quite heartbreaking moments.
Add Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the cameos one expects from MCU multiverse movies, and a mutant villain I want to see more of, and Deadpool & Wolverine is the Marvel movie we all need right now. And yes, Deadpool 3 is critically important for the future Avengers.
What I will spoil is one of the Deadpool & Wolverine plot details that gives us the definitive answer on how Marvel will bring back Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) without ruining the character’s arc and his death in Avengers: Endgame.
Warning: big spoilers will follow below. This is your last chance to avoid them.
Anchors in Deadpool & Wolverine
Deadpool & Wolverine brings back Wolverine despite Jackman’s character having died heroically in Logan, which was supposed to be his last Wolverine movie. But that was before Disney acquired Fox and made it possible for Wolverine and Deadpool to meet the Avengers.
Naturally, Marvel had a problem. It had to bring back Wolverine without ruining Logan’s death. Several months ago, a well-known MCU leaker said Marvel would use a new multiverse mechanism rather than devise complicated ways to revive Logan in Deadpool 3. The answer is Anchor Beings, which I’ll call Anchors.
Fast-forward to the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere, and we know that Anchors are real. Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) informs Deadpool upon recruiting him for the TVA that Earth-10005 is dying a slow death that could take millennia. That’s because that universe lost its Anchor when Logan died while making a heroic sacrifice.
“An anchor being is an entity of such vital importance that when they die, their whole world slowly withers out of existence,” Parodox told Wade. That was right before revealing to him that Deadpool isn’t the Anchor of his universe.
We then discover that Wolverine died in “an act of self-sacrifice so epic that it sent shivers down the timeline.” Paradox and the TVA are seriously in awe of Wolverine’s actions in Logan.
The TVA can’t stop the death of a timeline once it starts following the death of an Anchor Being. This triggers the whole action in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Iron Man can easily be an Anchor Being
What matters here is that the same definition would easily apply to Iron Man. His act of self-sacrifice in Endgame would be even more epic than Logan’s. I’m pretty sure there must be factions inside the TVA that hold the Iron Man of Earth-616, the MCU’s main reality, in a similar regard as Wolverine, if not higher.
Remember that the Earth-616 reality was carefully planned out by He Who Remains himself. Everything in the Infinity Saga, including most of the events in Endgame, was supposed to happen that way for a variant of Loki to meet Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) at the TVA. The Avengers won in that universe because they were predestined to do it. And while it was a team effort, Iron Man’s sacrifice sealed the victory.
This is the easiest way for Marvel to bring back Iron Man. But there’s an obvious downside: It won’t be the same Iron Man.
Anchor mechanism aside, Marvel has used the same general concept for reviving characters. Deaths are permanent. We never get the original. Loki, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Thanos (Josh Brolin), and now Wolverine all came back to life. But they were variants from other realities.
For Deadpool 3, Marvel gave us the redemption story of a Wolverine that was too much of a loser to be an Anchor in his reality. It’s the random Wolverine that Deadpool settled for while looking for a replacement for Logan. By the end of the film, Wolverine gets to stay in Deadpool’s reality, effectively replacing that reality’s Anchor.
The end of Deadpool & Wolverine also tells us that the TVA won’t change the events in Wolverine’s original timeline. What happened, happened.
All of that further informs us that the Iron Man variant we’ll get for Avengers 5 and Secret Wars won’t be from the main MCU reality. Not only that, but it doesn’t even have to be a good variant of Tony Stark.
Once the Earth-616 reality realizes they’re dying without an Iron Man version in here, anyone will do. This fits rather well with rumors that RDJ might play a version of Tony Stark that became Doctor Doom instead of Iron Man. Technically, it’d be the same “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,” but walking a different superhero/villain path.
The obvious problems
When I covered the Anchor rumor, I pointed out the obvious plot holes with Anchors:
The problem with this leak is the obvious potential for plot holes. Can Anchors die of old age? And what happens with a universe until an Anchor is born? Not to mention that, for Iron Man, this poses a problem. If he’s an Anchor, does that mean Marvel will revive him for good? That’s not so great for Endgame.
Marvel has not explained any of that, and it might never offer us any real explanation. But it needed the mechanism to explain why Deadpool needs a Wolverine, but a variant that’s not the Logan that already died.
The Anchor concept also fits Iron Man like a glove. But, as much or little sense as it might make, it’s not guaranteed that Marvel will reuse it. Maybe Iron Man isn’t an anchor, despite what he did. Maybe Marvel will use a different multiverse mechanism to bring Tony Stark back without completely destroying the legacy of the Iron Man variant who died in Endgame.
