Deadpool & Wolverine Theory Explains How The Trailer Hid The Movie's True Villain
During the Super Bowl LVIII broadcast, Marvel premiered its first "Deadpool & Wolverine" trailer, officially introducing Hugh Jackman's Wolverine to the MCU. Based on this preview footage, Wolverine and Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) are far from the only characters Disney is now canonizing since acquiring them from Fox. Other Marvel villains teased in the "Deadpool 3" trailer include Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) and Pyro (Aaron Stanford), while rumors claim a couple of additional X-Men antagonists are involved too. One Reddit user, however, theorized that none of these characters are the movie's true villain.
According to u/PecanCherry in a post to the general subreddit for fan theories, there's enough evidence in the "Deadpool & Wolverine" trailer to suggest that a multiverse variant of Deadpool might be one of the film's main antagonists. Deadpool, notably, shows up in this first trailer both in an environment resembling a forest from "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and sneaking up on Wolverine at some sort of casino. As u/PecanCherry proposed, "A variant of Deadpool is using an enhanced or buggy version of Cable's time-travel device to jump entire timelines. He pops up during the events of Age of Ultron hot on the Avengers' trail with malicious intent ... Later on, this Deadpool variant appears in another timeline to kill Wolverine in the casino."
The Deadpool from the prior two movies, then, could be teaming up with Wolverine to try to stop a variant of himself from wreaking havoc on the Marvel multiverse.
Multiverse shenanigans are already confirmed to be a part of Deadpool & Wolverine
It's already apparent that multiverse hopping is a part of "Deadpool & Wolverine" to some extent given the prominence of the TVA in the first trailer, which fans of "Loki" know is the organization responsible for maintaining multiversal peace. The notion that there will be at least two versions of Deadpool is also supported by the fact that, in the trailer's opening scene at Deadpool's apartment, Shatterstar (Lewis Tan) is alive and well despite dying in "Deadpool 2," implying that the scene is taking place in an alternate universe.
In their Reddit post, u/PecanCherry suggested that their hypothetically evil version of Deadpool might be working for Cassandra Nova, who's more-or-less a villainous version of X-Men leader Professor X. Her emergence in the MCU, meanwhile, has a basis in "Loki" too. "Cassandra, Pyro, and the 20th Century Fox logo are in region of the Void from the Loki series where variants related to X-Men timelines get dumped (which may be why it looks deserty instead of grassy)," they proposed.
Whether or not there's ultimately an evil Deadpool in "Deadpool 3," plenty of plot elements are already in place to give rise to such a possibility, lending more credence to this theory than we might offer to typical fan speculation.