Deadpool 2 Credits Scenes Are Canon. That's Not Good

The mid-credits scenes in Deadpool 2 are canon, the film’s co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have revealed in a Reddit AMA. That means whatever happens in those scenes is part of the movie and will affect future Deadpool chapters. We’ll have to dive into spoilers to talk about it in detail, so if you haven’t seen Deadpool 2 yet, stop reading now.

[Spoilers ahead]

During the credits, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) gets Cable’s time-traveling artefact repaired and refueled by Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and then uses it to do several things: he saves Vanessa and Peter, and then kills the other Deadpool from the 2009 subpar X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Reynolds while he’s reading the script of the 2011 flop Green Lantern.

While the latter two are obviously jokes and have no relation to the film’s events, the former two are very much part of the story, according to Reese and Wernick. It’s easy to see why audiences might think the whole thing was a joke, given the scenes appear one after another with no pause. It happened to us on our podcast where we discussed Deadpool 2.

Deadpool 2 Succeeds Because It Understands the Character

What’s more, it wasn’t always planned this way. In an interview with Empire, Reynolds revealed that he initially wasn’t on board with how the mid-credits panned out: “I was like ‘No, we can’t bring Vanessa back! That’s cheating!’ Rhett, Paul, and I thought, ‘Fine, if we’re going to go back to save Vanessa, then let’s bring back Peter, let’s kill Baraka-pool, and let’s execute Ryan Reynolds.’”

Reese and Wernick have also admitted it wasn’t a clever thing to do. In an interview with CinemaBlend, Wernick said: “It was one of those things where we all looked at it, and go, ‘Yeah, I mean on a purely tactical screenwriting basis it’s probably not the wisest thing to do, but it was just too funny and so much fun that I think the audience will forgive us for doing it, because time travel in general is kind of a funky thing. And so we just took our license with it and made it Deadpool.”

Though the Deadpool 2 writers – Reynolds, Reese, and Wernick – justify their screenwriting choices as part of an exaggerated gag or terming it part of the Deadpool appeal, they can’t hide the fact that it’s still lazy writing (something Deadpool openly mocks a couple of times in the film) which ultimately undermines the emotional weight of the film.

It’s bad enough to lay into the ‘fridging’ trope, where female characters are killed off just to provide narrative motivation for the male hero – something Reese and Wernick claimed they weren’t aware of, in the Reddit AMA – but it’s worse to use a character’s death to make audiences feel sad, only to reverse it at the end of the film. It doesn’t matter if your film is trying to subvert a genre when you’ve the same old regressive ideas.

We discussed Deadpool 2 in-depth with and without spoilers (starting at 26:15) on Transition, Gadgets 360's pop culture podcast. You can listen to it via Apple Podcasts or RSS, or just hit the play button below.