There’s a lot to like about Deadpool & Wolverine, which is currently crushing box office records in theaters everywhere. But one aspect that doesn’t work at all? The timeline. And specifically how this movie squares up with the timeline established in Logan.
Granted, the timeline of Fox’s X-Men movies has always been wishy-washy, at best. Whether a sliding timeline puts Magneto at 90-ish years old, or events happen that are summarily ignored in the next movie, you can’t spend a lot of time digging into whether it all works or not. It doesn’t, and you either enjoy the movies despite this, or it bothers you so much you write articles about it.
Deadpool and Deadpool 2 also played fast and loose with the continuity, almost seeming to exist in its own pocket X-Men universe before the events of Deadpool & Wolverine. Characters didn’t quite match up timewise with where they were in other movies. And not to mention, the X-Men themselves were referred to in ways they never really acted in the other flicks. But that’s fine, we accepted it and moved on.
That is until the third Deadpool movie decided to put a timeline on things.
Here’s the deal… Deadpool & Wolverine pretty squarely takes place in 2024. Meanwhile, Logan takes place in 2029. That’s on the surface, pretty weird, given that Logan’s (Hugh Jackman) death sets off the chain of events that drives the whole plot. But if you were confused, it’s plainly explained by Mr. Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen) in the middle of three thousand other pieces of exposition, so actually it makes sense if you missed it. Basically, the death of an Anchor Being — in this case, Wolverine in Logan — is such a big deal it reverberates both forward through the timeline, and backward. Hence the TVA (Time Variance Authority) knows about Logan’s death five years before it happened. Though also, the TVA exists outside time itself, so all of history is essentially happening simultaneously for them.
Good so far? It’s unnecessarily complicated, but the important point here is that Deadpool & Wolverine definitely takes place five years before Logan, right? Well, here’s the problem. A key plot point in Logan is that no mutant births have happened in 25 years. Doing some quick math, that means since around 2004. Before you ask, all of the rest of the X-Men movies take place in “the near future” so don’t worry too much about, say, X-Men: The Last Stand getting released in 2006.
The problem comes from Deadpool 2 taking place in 2018 — the year it was released — yet a major plot point revolves around a new mutant named Rusty (Julian Dennison), who used to live in an orphanage full of mutant kids. Though it’s not specified, Dennison was about 16 when the movie came out. That squares okay with the “no mutant births” timeline above (he was born in 2002), but there are all ages of kids in the orphanage being experimented on. If mutant births stopped in 2004, the youngest someone could be in the orphanage is 14 — yet there are definitely kids younger than that.
The other issue is that Deadpool 2 came out in the real world a year after Logan hit theaters — and Deadpool referred to the events of Logan happening in the past. This is less problematic, because Deadpool also knows that he’s, uh, Ryan Reynolds. So we can let that slide.
One more side effect of all of this “putting dates on the timeline” thing is that at the end of the movie, the version of Logan we’re following in the movie, and the Variant of X-23 (Dafne Keen) lost in The Void are both living in Deadpool’s universe. Which we’ve established is the same universe as Logan. Meaning that universe now has two Wolverines and two X-23’s running around. Not to mention that the Westchester Incident — aka Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) losing control of his powers and killing 600 people including the X-Men — is currently four years away.
Granted, the whole thing will probably be interrupted by the upcoming Avengers: Secret Wars, but that really puts a damper on the movie’s happy ending, huh?
Anyway, this all hardly matters because like we said, these X-Men movies play fast and loose with time. But perhaps that’s something they might want to settle on, before the MCU reboots the X-Men universe in the near future.
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