Deadpool & Wolverine

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) — The bridge film, and the reason this section matters.

The TVA determines that the Fox universe (Earth-10005) is dying because its anchor being — Logan — died in Logan. The universe is scheduled for erasure. The villain is Cassandra Nova, Xavier's twin sister, exiled to the Void — the junkyard reality at the end of time where the TVA dumps pruned timelines. There they find survivors of discarded franchises: Elektra, Blade, Gambit, X-23, and the Human Torch from the 2000s Fantastic Four films.

How does Wade search the multiverse? He steals a TimeRipper from the TVA. It's their own multiversal transit technology, not something he invented.

How is Wolverine alive if he died? He isn't the same one. The Logan of Logan stays dead — the film literally opens by digging up his grave and using his skeleton as a weapon. The Wolverine Wade recruits is a variant from another universe: one who arrived too late and let his own X-Men be slaughtered, and has been drinking about it since. Wade specifically goes looking for a Wolverine who's already broken.

How is the timeline saved? The TVA bureaucrat Paradox was using the TimeRipper to accelerate Earth-10005's destruction so he could get a promotion and build his own timeline. Wade and Logan destroy the device by grabbing its two opposing poles — matter and antimatter — absorbing enough voltage to kill anything, and surviving only because one regenerates and the other can't die.

But the actual save is quieter than the explosion. Hunter B-15 arrives afterwards to report that Earth-10005 has stopped decaying — the new Wolverine has taken over as its anchor being, replacing the one who died in Logan. Paradox had insisted an anchor being couldn't be replaced by a variant. He was wrong, and nobody at the TVA understands why it worked.

Half true, and worth being precise about, because the two halves point in opposite directions.

Wolverine: yes, permanently. He is a variant recruited from an entirely different reality, and at the end of the film he stays on Earth-10005 — Wade's world — rather than going home. His own universe is written off as a lost cause, and he becomes the new anchor being of this one. Laura / X-23 stays too; the final scene has both of them in Wade's living room with Blind Al and Vanessa.

Deadpool: no — and refusing is the entire plot. Paradox's opening offer is exactly that switch: join Earth-616, the Sacred Timeline, get a shot at the Avengers, and let Earth-10005 be quietly deleted. Wade is briefly thrilled. Then he learns the price is everyone he knows, refuses, breaks Paradox's nose, steals his TemPad, and spends the rest of the film trying to save his own universe instead. He ends the film exactly where he started.

What both of them do do is travel constantly: Wade bounces across dozens of realities on the stolen TemPad hunting a usable Wolverine, and both are then pruned into the Void — which sits outside universes rather than being one.

One retcon that causes confusion: this film establishes that Deadpool was always on Earth-10005, the same universe as the Fox X-Men films. The earlier Deadpool films never made that clear and contain inconsistencies with X-Men continuity. Marvel decided it was true and moved on.

So if the video said "they switch universes," it was probably compressing Wolverine's permanent move and the general multiverse-hopping into one claim. Wade never switches.

Does Loki control the TVA by this point? Unclear, and the film goes out of its way not to say. Chronologically it's after Loki Season 2, so Loki is at the end of time holding the timelines — yet the TVA here still prunes universes and Paradox acts largely on his own authority.

The film simply didn't want to engage with it. Don't build theories on it.

They save the Fox timeline.

Which is precisely why the original X-Men cast can appear in Doomsday — the universe they live in was rescued from deletion, and the multiverse is now permeable.

Whether Doomsday's X-Men are the exact individuals from the original trilogy or variants of them is not confirmed. The trailer suggests the former; Marvel has not said.