Minor spoilers ahead for Deadpool, in theaters now.
It’s only a few minutes into the brilliant first act of Tim Miller’s Deadpool movie when we see Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead make their first appearances, cementing the fact that, yes, the X-Men are a thriving concern in 2015.
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This is really only a question because the X-Men movies have been in flashback mode for quite some time, excepting a few short bits of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which took place in an alternate timeline, so suggest very little about what the present of the X-Men Universe might look like on film.
Even the forthcoming X-Men: Apocalypse is set in the 1980s, which might make a Deadpool tie-in or cameo difficult (though not impossible). So…how exactly does Deadpool fit into the world director Bryan Singer is building?
There are a few things we learned — and very few. The X-Men still hang out at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, and Professor Xavier himself is still alive.
For anyone who objects, saying that Piotr just said “the professor,” we’ll note that Deadpool asks whether it’s James McAvoy or Patrick Stewart.
Another character who’s still alive in 2015? Hank McCoy, also known as Beast. If he were dead, it wouldn’t make any sense for Deadpool to joke about him pooping on the lawn, right?
The suits and the Blackbird are in play again, and the suits are definitely more inspired by Grant Morrison’s run on the comics, and/or the world of X-Men: First Class, than they are the original ’90s/2000s X-Men movie costumes, which were almost all black. There’s plenty of yellow on that suit Negasonic eventually sports.
Beyond that…well, we don’t know much. We see that the X-Men are still active, still fairly well-funded and that many of the key players remain recognizable. We also see that, at least by Deadpool’s metric, they’re considered the goody two-shoes of superheroes, which might suggest why something like X-Force could be a viable movie in this universe — differentiating between the take-no-prisoners style of meting out justice that Deadpool favors, and the more traditional superheroics that leave judgment calls to the authorities.
Which, ultimately, is pretty similar to what the original X-Force purpose ostensibly was in the comics, if I’m remembering. They didn’t exactly have Charles Xavier’s blessing.
