Deadpool & Wolverine is the key to unlocking Iron Man’s return, says Kevin Feige

Once you undo death in your fictional universe, it’s over. No matter how carefully and tactfully a character is brought back from the dead, the stakes will never be quite the same. Comic book fans are used to retcons and deus ex machinas, and it was fairly expected that superhero cinema would follow the same formula. But it took many years for Marvel to establish a canon that could then be retconned. While Deadpool & Wolverine surprisingly marks the first time the MCU has revived a dead main character, unsurprisingly, Kevin Feige sees it as a road map forward for beloved characters like Iron Man or Captain America.

“That’s the key, right? How do you do it in a way that maintains what has come before, and in a great way?” Feige mused to DiscussingFilm about undoing death. “And we’ve been spending, you know, the last two-plus years figuring that out for Wolverine. So, what’s to come? We’ll see. We’re just proud that we, I think, have figured it out for Wolverine. I think Hugh’s appearance and starring role in [Deadpool & Wolverine] is a great sign that it can be done—if great care is taken.” 

With the multiverse, all things are possible. Deadpool & Wolverine’s Wolverine is a variant—in other words, a mostly different character—of the one we saw die in Logan. Nerds have long been preparing for this sort of thing through comic books and Doctor Who. Marvel has been priming mainstream movie audiences for it since Spider-Man: No Way Home, which proved with great power comes great fan service. Never mind that Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness was explicitly about how mining the multiverse for dead loved ones is a bad and evil thing to do. This is how we get Robert Downey Jr. to tap dance for us forever!

It’s no secret that Marvel Studios has been considering the nuclear option, a.k.a., bringing back the original Avengers team line up. (Even the Russo Brothers are back in the mix to direct.) The current prospects for the next Avengers saga have failed to drum up the same excitement, and the MCU desperately wants to reclaim some of its old glory. At this point, though, so many of its major entries are falling back on nostalgia and multiverse gimmicks rather than relying on a great story that can stand alone. Just look at Deadpool & Wolverine, where early reactions for the film as a whole are decidedly mixed, despite praise for Hugh Jackman. 

Of course, resuscitating corpses isn’t the only trick Kevin Feige has up his sleeve. “It’s just the beginning. I’ve said that mutants are coming, and it all starts with this movie,” he told Marvel Live at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere. “I can’t wait for people to see what [Deadpool & Wolverine] has in store and know that this is the beginning of mutants finally, finally arriving into the MCU.” But will they be brand-new mutants, or resurrected ones?