How Deadpool 2 Breaks The X-Men Movie Timeline AGAIN
2. Does It Even Matter Anyway?
As pretty much every time travel movie ever released has firmly stated, if you go back into the past and meddle with even the smallest event, there's no telling what impact it will have on the future. It's the Butterfly Effect, only without Ashton Kutcher.
That's why it's odd that Cable thinks he can go into the past and change it in order to stop Firefist from becoming a villain and eventually killing his family in the future. Surely wiping Russell out would have thousands of possible ramifications? Cable could effectively wipe himself out of existence, which is why it's smart he stays where he is ultimately.
But that pitfall is ran rough-shod over in the mid-credits scene when Deadpool gets his hands on Cable's time travel device and goes back in time to save Vanessa and Peter, kill Ryan Reynolds and wipe out the X-Men Origins version of Wade Wilson. Wouldn't changing the past to stop Vanessa's death stop Deadpool from killing himself and subsequently becoming an X-Men trainee and becoming involved with Russell at all?
If Vanessa doesn't die, Russell probably does, which completely changes the timeline. Or does it? In order for Cable to be in the past, the future has to go exactly the same way up to the point he came back from the future. He might have been thwarted in his attempt to kill Russell, but that doesn't mean he stopped him becoming the murderer he later is, because succeeding in that agenda would erase the Cable who travelled back to the past completely.
Horrifyingly, neither Cable nor Deadpool's messing with the timeline can have changed anything at all.
Perhaps thinking about it too much is pointless? After all, David Leitch has said it wasn't a primary concern...
"I think Deadpool, because it's its own entity, we're flexible with the timeline, per se. "But we've never had a lot of conversations about that."
Essentially, they don't really care, which it's looked like has been the case with Fox for some time. Perhaps it's just smarter to think about this timeline as happening in an entirely different universe?