Despite introducing a new Logan variant in the form of “Worst Wolverine,” Deadpool & Wolverine repeats a decades-old backstory problem and the power levels of the X-Men. Deadpool & Wolverine has smashed box office records and proved that the appetite for superhero movies is still rife among modern audiences. The reasons for its success are multifaceted, but the fact that Deadpool & Wolverine featured cameos aplenty, playing off of the nostalgia of its older audience, was a stroke of genius.

Nevertheless, Deadpool & Wolverine did not feature the X-Men themselves. While a couple of central characters from Fox’s X-Men franchise, like Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, have already made their MCU debuts, the fact that none of them featured alongside the de facto main character of the X-Men franchise in his MCU debut is notable. Their conspicuous absence is rendered all the more frustrating by the reasons behind it, which suggests that Wolverine was the most powerful among them.

Deadpool & Wolverine’s Logan Survivor Story Downplays The X-Men’s Powers

The New Wolverine’s X-Men Team Were Killed By Humans

The new Wolverine counterbalances Deadpool’s irreverence with pathos as he reluctantly recounts the backstory that earned him the unfortunate “worst” moniker in Deadpool & Wolverine. Within it, Wolverine’s ex-team is slaughtered by humans in his absence, only for him to wreak extreme vengeance and harm innocents in the process. While it certainly provides Wolverine with ample guilt and a reason to seek redemption, the backstory skirts over how a marauding mob of humans was able to best the entire X-Men team before Wolverine takes them down independently.

Humans were able to defeat the X-Men with the help of Bastion and his Sentinel technology in X-Men ’97 after turning themselves into Prime Sentinels, though Wolverine had his work cut out alongside Nightcrawler.

The story may gloss over key details like the strategies employed by the mob, but that still leaves a lot of questions. Wolverine specifies that X-Men like Jean Grey and Storm were among those that insisted he wear his iconic yellow suit, after earlier mentioning Charles Xavier. If all of these X-Men were massacred together, it beggars belief that Wolverine could have taken on the assailants himself in the absence of this support. Compounding this is the fact that this is not the first time the X-Men have been quashed in the name of propping up Wolverine’s story.

The X-Men’s Movie History Has Killed Off The Team Before For Wolverine’s Story

Logan And Days Of Future Past Killed The X-Men Off-Screen

The “worst” Wolverine isn’t even the only variant in Deadpool & Wolverine whose team was massacred. Original timeline Logan, whose skeleton makes a hilariously dynamic appearance in the opening sequence, was the latest Wolverine whose X-Men were killed off-screen to pave the road for his swansong. In fact, both of the movie’s Wolverine variants draw from the same tragic Marvel Comics story that also places Wolverine front and center on the backdrop of his team’s demise.

Before that, Wolverine was chosen out of all the X-Men from the original timeline to have his consciousness transported to the past in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Meanwhile, his teammates – now united with Magento’s mutant team – are massacred by Sentinels. While the other Wolverine variants at least stand on comic book precedent, this MacGuffin feels particularly blatant as the original comic saw Kitty Pryde go back in time, instead.

All of this occurs in Marvel movies even though Wolverine, unlike myriad other X-Men characters like Professor X, Magneto, Ice Man, and Storm, is not considered an omega-level mutant. He is, however, practically immortal due to his healing factor – as the Deadpool & Wolverine ending sequence highlighted. This is one reason Wolverine continues to outlast his teammates – but the reasons also run far deeper.

Why Deadpool & Wolverine’s Logan Backstory Needed The X-Men To Die

Wolverine’s Character Arc Depended On It

The new Wolverine was portrayed to be a particularly cantankerous variant in Deadpool & Wolverine, and at least more so than his main timeline counterpart in Fox’s X-Men franchise. Part of what makes the character’s arc in Deadpool & Wolverine so touching – culminating in his attempt to sacrifice himself to save trillions – is the narrative heft of his tragic backstory. Complicated as it may be to have the X-Men’s most powerful members slaughtered by humans, it was needed to turn this Wolverine into such a compelling companion to Deadpool, who seems positively virtuous by comparison.

The fact that Wolverine was able to destroy the human assailants solo through his berserker rage alone also helps to cement his legendary status among fans. On a more practical level, the amount of cameos already featured in Deadpool & Wolverine was already a bone of contention among some critics. Introducing any more of Fox’s X-Men characters in the space of the same movie would have been difficult to sell, and afforded them too little screen time to have made it any different to killing them off-screen anyway.