‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Ending Explained: How It Sets Up ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’

Deadpool is coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which means everything is about to change. Or is it? The great promise of bringing Ryan Reynolds’ fourth wall-breaking Merc with a Mouth to the MCU is mostly fulfilled in , it’s becomes a kind of Island of Misfit Toys for forgotten Marvel characters (ie every superhero or supervillain from the 20th Century Fox era).

Deadpool and Wolverine meet characters from the Fox X-Men movies and other pre-MCU projects. They even encounter superheroes that never got their big-screen debut. The latter includes the movie’s Big Bad, , the big Avengers crossover event set to end the Multiverse Saga? It’s too early to tell, though this brief scene clearly suggests as much.

And with the film’s introduction of anchor beings, which are the people whose existence keeps their timeline from falling apart, Deadpool & Wolverine is already setting the stage for the beginning of Secret Wars. But thankfully, this kind of Marvel lore-building is fairly minimal and limited to the first 40 minutes of the film. What matters is the rest of it, and how it bids goodbye to a formative, if tumultuous, era of superhero movies.

The Goodbye to Fox We Needed (Feat. a Very Deadpool Credits Scene)

Deadpool & Wolverine dedicates most of its runtime (and cameos) to paying homage to the pre-MCU era of Marvel movies with a particular focus on 20th Century Fox, which acquired the rights to both the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. To that end, we see characters from films like Blade, Daredevil, Elektra, Fantastic Four, the X-Men movies, and of course, Logan. While the latter gets a questionable homage via an opening scene that literally uses Logan’s skeleton to bash in the heads of TVA agents, the rest of the homages range from loving to tongue-in-cheek — the Sabretooth and Logan face-off is given appropriate hype, while Blade (Wesley Snipes) and Elektra (Jennifer Garner) get to show off how badass they still are. And the very meta appearance of Chris Evans as Johnny Storm — which gets expanded in a foul-mouthed post-credits scene — is the biggest sign that this is a film about looking back, not looking forward.

It’s all cemented during the credits roll, when Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” plays over scenes and behind-the-scenes footage from all the Fox movies, good and bad (good for them, trying to make X-Men: Apocalypse appear decent). It’s Marvel’s own In Memoriam for the 20th Century chapter, a sweet and loving gesture to a series of films that did so much to launch the modern superhero era and create the foundation upon which the MCU stands today. We had the time of our lives.

Deadpool & Wolverine is playing in theaters now.