Warning: SPOILERS for Deadpool & Wolverine are ahead!
When Logan was released in 2017, it was supposed to be Hugh Jackman’s final appearance as Wolverine. Then the actor changed his mind and decided to don the adamantium claws gain for Deadpool & Wolverine, the latest of the Marvel movies in order to watch. However, in order to preserve Logan’s impact, Jackman instead playing a Wolverine from a different universe, and his original Wolverine stayed dead. However, the third Deadpool movie still found a hilarious way to poke fun at Logan’s ending, and Michael Green, who co-wrote the script with director James Mangold and Scott Frank, has shared how he reacted to the sequence.
Let’s do a quick recap first. Upon learning that the death of Earth-10005’s Wolverine, i.e. the one who perished in Logan, has resulted in that universe dying, a process that Time Variance Authority agent Paradox intended to speed up, Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson used a TemPad to travel to Wolverine’s grave in North Dakota. Wade believed that he merely needed to get Wolverine’s healing factor going again so he could be resurrected, but he realized that couldn’t happen upon finding the buried adamantium skeleton. When TVA agents surrounded Wade at the gravesite, he proceeded to kill them all using different parts of the skeleton, all while dancing to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye.”
Yeah, that’s a lot to take in, and Michael Green informed IGN that although he’d received a vague tipoff that Logan would addressed in Deadpool & Wolverine’s opening, he was surprised what unfolded before his eyes when seeing it in a theater. As he put it:
People had warned me ahead of time, ‘Uh, I don’t know how you’re gonna feel about the opening [of Deadpool & Wolverine].’ I’m like, ‘I think I know what’s gonna happen.’ And I did not know! I didn’t know they were gonna go that far.
Given how Logan was such a dramatic and emotionally heavy story that also saw Patrick Stewart’s Professor X being killed, the complete 180 that was the Deadpool & Wolverine opening credits sequence was pretty jarring, though in such an amusing way. Green continued by explaining why he didn’t feel that what the latest MCU entry did was disrespectful to Logan’s ending:
You weren’t meant to take seriously that they were, like, digging him up, and that it was really him. It felt less like they were trying to change the ending of Logan as they were contending with not feeling that they wanted to make a movie as good as they felt Logan was, which is a huge compliment! I felt like it was nothing but complimentary.
Michael Green also described Deadpool & Wolverine as being “such a good time,” and that the people in the theater where he saw it “went bananas to everything.” He then added that he appreciated no Green Lantern jokes were thrown into the threequel, as Green co-wrote that critically and commercially-underwhelming movie with Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg. Considering Deadpool 2’s end-credits scene showed the Merc with the Mouth going back in time to kill Ryan Reynolds right as he was about to read the Green Lantern script for the first time, it’s safe to say that nothing could have topped that dig at the DC movie.
While Deadpool & Wolverine continues its theatrical run, feel free to stream Logan with your Disney+ subscription. If you’d rather look to the future, then I’ll direct you to our upcoming Marvel movies and upcoming Marvel TV shows guides to see what the MCU is delivering over the next several years.