Deadpool & Wolverine Ending Explained: How Does It Affect the MCU Multiverse?

Let's make this simple: You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Deadpool & Wolverine. The answer is yes, so be sure to stick around till the very end. Full spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine follow!

Deadpool & Wolverine has finally arrived to end the drought of new MCU movies in 2024. This new film is the first to feature Ryan Reynolds' Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman's Logan playing in the MCU sandbox. Fittingly, it's also the first R-rated MCU movie. We'd expect nothing less from the Merc With a Mouth.

Given how much it plays with the concept of the multiverse and bringing characters like Wade and Logan into the MCU fold for the first time, there’s a lot of potential for Deadpool & Wolverine to impact the ongoing Multiverse Saga and alter the course of the MCU as we know it. But does it do that? How does the MCU change now that Deadpool has left his mark? Will we see these characters again in a future movie like Avengers: Secret Wars? Let’s break down the ending to this epic crossover and how it may influence the Multiverse Saga going forward.

Like so many Marvel movies before it, Deadpool & Wolverine revolves around a battle between good and evil for control of a MacGuffin device. In this case, Wade and Logan race against the clock to stop Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova from harnessing the TVA’s Time Ripper (a machine we can only assume was originally invented by Ke Huy Quan’s character O.B. from the Loki series). Whereas Matthew Macfayden’s character Mr. Paradox wanted to use the Time Ripper to hurry along the preordained death of Deadpool’s Earth-10005 timeline, Cassandra intends to use it as a tool to destroy every branch of the multiverse, leaving her free to reign supreme inside the Void.

After battling their way through the Deadpool Corps (a group that features everyone from Blake Lively’s Lady Deadpool to Nathan Fillion’s Headpool to Matthew McConaughey’s Cowboy Deadpool), Wade and Logan make it inside the TVA. They learn the only way to stop Cassandra is for someone to access the machine powering the Time Ripper and serve as a physical bridge connecting the matter and anti-matter components. While this will cause a chain reaction that destroys the Time Ripper, it’ll also annihilate the person in the process.

Wolverine is only too happy to make that sacrifice. Having thoroughly failed the X-Men on his world, murdering innocents in the revenge berserker rage that followed, and spending years wallowing in alcohol-soaked misery, he wants to make that heroic sacrifice. He needs it. But as Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan reminded Wade at the beginning of the movie, being a superhero isn’t about your selfish personal desires and needs. So Wade sabotages that act of sacrifice and puts himself in Logan’s place.

But even that isn’t enough, as Wade struggles to connect the two halves of the machine. Only when Logan barges in and joins hands with his new buddy are they able to complete the circuit and successfully sabotage the Time Ripper. It’s a crossover movie. Of course the solution was going to involve working together. Fortunately for both heroes, joining hands spares them a painful death by molecular annihilation (the result of their combined healing factors).

It’s a happy ending for basically everyone but Cassandra Nova, who herself is wiped right out of existence by the exploding Time Ripper. Paradox is thrown in TVA prison. Wunwi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15 from the Loki series and Rob Delaney’s Peter make googly eyes at each other, and everyone admires Hugh Jackman’s abs for a while.

Ultimately, both Wade and Logan return to a rejuvenated Earth-10005. It turns out that Wade’s harebrained scheme to save his world actually worked. Bringing the Wolverine of another world into the Fox Deadpool/X-Men universe means that reality again has its anchor being. Even Dafne Keen’s Laura is given a second chance at life and joins the happy family, having escaped the Void. And with Wade and Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa seemingly patching things up, everything is coming up Deadpool.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a post-credits scene in Deadpool & Wolverine. It wouldn’t really be an MCU movie without one. Or a Deadpool sequel, for that matter. Both previous Deadpool movies had very memorable post-credits scenes. The original ended with a parody of the stinger from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while Deadpool 2 ended with Wade’s time travel escapades.

Deadpool & Wolverine does things a little bit differently. It eschews the traditional MCU mid-credits sequence in favor of showing a montage of behind-the-scenes clips from Fox’s various Marvel movies, all to the tune of Green Day’s “Good Riddance.” As much as the film pokes fun at the Fox universe, this is its way of paying a sentimental tribute to those films.

From there, Deadpool & Wolverine presents us with an uproarious post-credits scene where Wade returns to reveal the truth about Chris Evans’ Human Torch. It turns out that Johnny Storm did actually spew all those thoroughly NSFW insults at Cassandra Nova, allowing Evans the chance to curse up a storm in true Deadpool fashion. Maybe Johnny didn’t deserve to have his skin ripped off, but it’s still a vindication for Deadpool, more or less.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Deadpool & Wolverine is that, despite being as steeped in the multiverse as much as any other recent MCU project, it doesn’t have a seismic effect on the Multiverse Saga. It’s a pretty self-contained movie, with only one scene (Wade’s job interview) actually taking place in the MCU proper.

But should we be surprised? Would Marvel truly risk making an R-rated and definitely adults-only movie a critical linchpin of the Multiverse Saga? The goal seems to have always been telling a more standalone Marvel story.

Director Shawn Levy confirmed as much to IGN, saying, “We very intentionally did not want to make a Marvel movie that is a commercial or a setup for the next Marvel movie. So we are not part of any phase that I know of. We acknowledge the antecedents, we respect the legacy that we're inheriting, but our goal was to do a self-contained story. As to whether these characters move on from here, time will tell, but I'd sure love to see it and I'd also love to be a part of it.”

As Levy alludes, there’s certainly the potential for Deadpool and this version of Wolverine to appear elsewhere in the MCU. That could take the form of Deadpool 4, or even an X-Force ensemble movie (something Fox was developing once upon a time). Frankly, we’d be shocked if Reynolds and Jackman don’t at least reprise their roles in some capacity for Avengers: Secret Wars.

The post-credits scene for The Marvels certainly suggests that Marvel Studios has ongoing plans for the Fox X-Men characters. That scene shows Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau waking up in an unfamiliar universe where her mother Maria (Lashana Lynch) is Binary and working alongside Kelsey Grammer’s Beast. Beast, in turn, references Patrick Stewart's Professor Xavier (who we also saw in a different universe in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness).

That scene is clearly setting up the Fox X-Men to have a direct role in the Multiverse Saga. Rumors are even growing that Avengers 5 (previously titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty) is being reworked to become an Avengers vs. X-Men movie, something that could be announced as soon as the Marvel Studios panel at Comic-Con.

The question is whether the universe introduced at the end of The Marvels is Earth-10005 or another world where the X-Men are also played by the Fox cast. If it’s not, we could soon be meeting yet another Wolverine variant who looks like Hugh Jackman. Jackman may indeed continue playing the character until he’s 90, but not necessarily as the version introduced in Deadpool & Wolverine.

The Importance of Anchor Beings In the MCU

While Deadpool & Wolverine has proven to be a fairly self-contained Marvel movie, there is one important concept introduced in the film that will probably go on to play a key role in the climax of the Multiverse Saga. Deadpool & Wolverine introduces us to the notion of anchor beings. Every universe has an anchor being - a person of pivotal importance whose death causes that universe to slowly wither and die.

Earth-10005’s anchor being was the Wolverine from the Logan movie (again, the confusing nature of the Fox X-Men movies makes it difficult to categorically say that character was the same version that was in, say, X-Men 1, despite what Deadpool & Wolverine might imply). His death in Logan sparked the slow collapse of the Earth-10005 timeline, at least until Wade fixed the problem by bringing in a new Wolverine. Though this new Logan isn’t exactly a spring chicken, either, so it’s only a matter of time before Earth-10005 resumes that 4000-year process of decay.

We’ll almost certainly hear more about anchor beings as the Multiverse Saga continues to unfold. What makes them so important? Do they have anything to do with the phenomenon of Incursions, where parallel universes collide and threaten to destroy one another?

And perhaps most importantly, who is the anchor being of the all-important Earth-616, a.k.a. the Sacred Timeline of the MCU? Could it be Tom Holland’s Spider-Man or Chris Evans’ Captain America? Or is it Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark, the man who kicked off the modern age of heroes and saved the entire universe in Avengers: Endgame? If it is Tony, the fact that he died saving the universe could, ironically, lead to the death of that universe. That could well become a major plot element heading into Avengers: Secret Wars and the seemingly inevitable collapse of the multiverse. Anchor beings may wind up driving the plot in the same way Paragons do in DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Who do you think is the anchor being of the MCU? Cast your vote in our poll and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

For more on Deadpool & Wolverine, see what Kevin Feige has to say about the post-MCU quality debate and brush up on the inconsistent history of X-Men video games.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.