Deadpool & Wolverine Trailer Explained: What Is the Time Variance Authority?

WTF is the TVA? Marvel Studios dropped the self-referential Deadpool & Wolverine Super Bowl trailer, featuring the returns of meta-mouthed mercenary Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) of the X-Men — the latter dying at the end of 2017's Logan, set in the not-too-distant future of 2029 when mutants are all but X-tinct. Jackman has stated that Wolverine's return in Deadpool 3 wouldn't "screw with the Logan timeline," and now we might know why: the timeline-tampering Time Variance Authority (TVA), an organization introduced in Marvel's Loki that oversees all of time — for all time, always.

After the events of Avengers: Endgame — where would-be ruler Loki (Tom Hiddleston) used the cosmic Tesseract to escape the timeline of 2012's The Avengers — the God of Mischief was arrested by the TVA for crimes against the Sacred Timeline. The TVA's army of Hunters and Minutemen then reset the timelines and pruned "Variants": people who stepped off their pre-determined path, creating a nexus event. If left unchecked, those timelines could branch off into the multiverse — threatening the Sacred Timeline.

TVA mascot Miss Minutes (Tara Strong), an animated anthromorphic clock, claimed that the all-knowing Time-Keepers created the Time Variance Authority after a multiversal war where an infinite number of timelines nearly caused the destruction of all realities. The Time-Keepers reorganized the multiverse into a single timeline — the Sacred Timeline — and used the TVA to protect and preserve the proper flow of time.

In reality, the Time-Keepers and the TVA were the creation of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors): a 31st-Century scientist who oversaw the Sacred Timeline from the Citadel at the End of Time. But when Loki variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) killed He Who Remains, she unleashed the multiverse and a multiversal threat: Kang the Conqueror (Majors). In Loki season 2, the trickster weaved together the branches of time that another HWR Variant, Victor Timely (Majors), warned were expanding into an infinitely-growing multiverse, and replaced the TVA's time-refining Temporal Loom with Yggdrasil the World Tree of Norse mythology. Loki then fulfilled his glorious purpose: protecting time, For All Time. Always.

Loki executive producer Kevin Wright previously told ComicBook's Phase Zero podcast that the TVA could connect the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the wider multiverse — including the X-Verse and Deadpool 3.

"I think everything we are doing here certainly lays the groundwork for fertile storytelling elsewhere," Wright said. "I can say from everyone on the Loki team, we are hopeful and excited about the possibility of the TVA being able to continue to tell stories at the TVA. I always kind of think of them as our time-based multiverse version of S.H.I.E.L.D. — we can use them in so many places and tell so many cool stories."

The X-Verse has its own history of alternate timelines. 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past saw a time-traveling Wolverine prevent a dystopian future for Charles Xavier's (Patrick Stewart) mutant team, and Deadpool used Cable's (Josh Brolin) time-travel device to erase 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine from the X-Men timeline in Deadpool 2. 

Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine is in theaters July 26.

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