Spoilers ahead for Deadpool 2.
Depending on how seriously you want to take the post-credits scenes for Deadpool 2, there’s two ways to read the ending—that it happened or that it’s been undone by Deadpool’s time traveling. I’m going to say that the ending actually happened (since Deadpool undoing Vanessa’s death would pretty much undo the entire story) and that the post-credits scene is just a goof. So if we take the ending at face value, what does it mean for the future of the franchise?
To recap, the ending of the movie involves Deadpool finally reaching out to Russell, and while he thought it would mean sacrificing himself to save the kid’s soul, it turns out that Cable had used the pure-lead game token as a way to shield Deadpool from the bullet’s impact. Russell decides he doesn’t have to kill the headmaster at the Essex school (Dopinder ends up taking care of that), Deadpool learns that he has to give his heart to other people, and Cable, with his wife and daughter saved, decides to stick around in our time so that the future doesn’t go to hell.
It’s a nice ending, and as cynical as the character can be, he basically gets to walk into the sunset with possibly a new X-Force that will presumably fare better than the X-Force that we saw earlier in the movie. If Fox and writer-director Drew Goddard decides to carry this entire team forward into their eventual X-Force movie, then the team will consist of Deadpool, Cable, Domino, Dopinder, Yukio, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Colossus, and Russell, which isn’t a bad lineup! Sure, Dopinder doesn’t have any special powers, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be a valuable addition!
The question Deadpool 2 really raises is what the series becomes when it turns into X-Force. It looks like that will be the next movie for Deadpool rather than Deadpool 3, and the tone of an ensemble has to be different than when the entire story is filtered through Deadpool’s fourth-wall breaking antics. Plus, you have to actually service storylines for characters like Cable and Domino rather than just having them in Deadpool’s wacky orbit.
However, Deadpool 2 doesn’t choose to directly tease X-Force, and you could easily walk away thinking that X-Force was just a gag to kill off a bunch of supporting characters MacGruber-style. But there is an X-Force movie in the works, and Fox reportedly hopes to start shooting it in October. How it compares to Deadpool 2 remains to be seen.
What do you want to see in an X-Force movie? How closely should it resemble the Deadpool films? Sound off in the comments section.
