After more than a decade and a half of movies, fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe know to stay until the end to see what surprises the post-credits sequences might have in store. Audiences who saw Deadpool and Wolverine, now in theaters, were probably extra-interested in the post-credits scenes, as despite being the Merc with a Mouth's first flick since Disney acquired Fox – and with it the ability to bring Deadpool into the MCU – neither Ryan Reynold nor Hugh Jackman enter the main MCU canon by the time the credits roll. If you watched till the end expecting a stinger that changed the MCU's status quo, you didn't find it. That's because the end credits weren't about what's next for the MCU. They were a wake for the Fox era.
Yes, all the Fox movies – including the stinkers, of which there were many. It's a weirdly effective montage that might have you fondly reminiscing about such superhero nadirs as Josh Trank's widely panned 2015 Fantastic Four movie.
This story contains some light spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine
When does Deadpool and Wolverine take place on the Marvel timeline?
The bulk of Deadpool & Wolverine's credits are accompanied by a montage of clips and behind-the-scenes footage of almost a quarter-century of movies that Fox made in association with Marvel. The montage is set to Green Day's 'Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)' — a perfect song choice, as the overplayed track works as the sort of cliché meta joke that Deadpool traffics in while also being earnestly moving despite the corniness.
It's a fun montage, kicking off with behind-the-scenes footage of Jackman, looking fresh and baby-faced as he prepares to play Wolverine for the first time in 2000's X-Men. We also get clips of Ryan Reynolds talking about how significant Deadpool is to him during the filming of his first stab at the character, 2009's much-maligned X-Men Origins: Wolverine. There are clips of Chris Evans playing the Human Torch in the mid-'00s Fantastic Four movies, shots of Jennifer Garner wielding sais as Elektra, and lots of little shots from various Fox movies, including the post-First Class crop of X-Men movies, Logan, and the aforementioned Trank Fantastic Four. (As far as I could tell while watching, there are no clips of Blade despite Wesley Snipes making a cameo. This is likely because 20th Century Fox didn't have a hand in making those three films.)
The montage is almost like an epitaph, and it concludes by honoring the official end of 20th Century Fox's Marvel movies. Anybody who watched Deadpool & Wolverine presumably knows all this, as what felt like 90 percent of the jokes were dependant on the audience knowing the behind-the-scenes corporate dealings, but 20th Century Fox was able to make X-Men and Fantastic Four movies because the studio bought the film rights to the Marvel characters when the comic book company went bankrupt in the '90s. In 2009, Disney bought Marvel, and a decade after that the House of Mouse bought Fox. It was a massive, expensive merger with a whole lot of ramifications (including lots of people losing their jobs), but for superhero fans, the topline takeaway was that the MCU could now introduce the X-Men.
Five years later, and the MCU still hasn't introduced the X-Men to the main MCU continuity, despite some fun alternate-universe cameos from the likes of Patrick Stewart's Professor X in the Doctor Strange sequel and Kelsey Grammar's Beast in The Marvels. Deadpool & Wolverine, despite extending Deadpool an in-fiction invitation to the MCU proper, still hasn't fully crossed the streams. A Fantastic Four reboot is coming next year, and the MCU will eventually introduce Mutants properly. But part of the reason why fans are so eager for that to happen stems from the sense that the MCU is Marvel done right. The Infinity Saga was, for better or worse, a feat of worldbuilding. The movies were largely good, the continuity was detailed, and almost every Marvel character could show up to play. The Fox era, by contrast, was a mess. The timelines and continuity within X-Men famously do not make any sense, and despite some great standouts like X2 and Logan, recent releases like X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix were pretty bad. The '00s Fantastic Four movies aren't especially fondly remembered, and the Trank one is downright reviled.
And yet by using its ending credits as a chance to look back at almost 25 years of Fox rather than plow ahead with whatever implications Deadpool & Wolverine might have to the future of the MCU, the movie makes the audience feel fondly about the flicks they'd previously been in a rush to move past (after bringing out the old stars for one last unexpected cameo, of course). A huge part of this comes from the montage's behind-the-scenes clips. When we see Jackman – in his early 30s and sounding much more Australian than he does now – seem nervous and excited about the prospect of playing Wolverine in a superhero movie, before the genre became the biggest craze at the box office, it makes you a lot more emotional about the films that followed. Even the bad ones, like X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
(And, yes, even Trank's Fantastic Four.)
The ending montage might, against all odds, be the most sincere part of Deadpool & Wolverine. RIP to the 20th Century Fox Marvel movies. They weren't perfect, but they existed and people made them. They deserve at least a kind thought before they're sent to the Void.
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