I ended my 2024 review saying I had no idea what to make of Robert Downey Jr. being cast as Doctor Doom and that I’d need something to actually go on. Two years later I have plenty to go on, and my instinct that week was about half right. The half I got right is that it was a bold swing and this franchise badly needed one. The half I got wrong is that I framed it as possibly an admission they couldn’t move past him, and that reading hasn’t held up at all. Doom isn’t Tony Stark with a mask on, and nothing about how it’s been handled since suggests the recast was nostalgia wearing a disguise.
In 2024 I wrote about this as a Deadpool film with unusually good taste about the Fox catalogue, and that’s still true and it badly undersells what the film was actually doing. This is the film that formally imports the Fox universe into the MCU — not in spirit, but in the actual plumbing. It establishes that pruned timelines exist, that characters can come out of them, and that the machinery for pulling a Patrick Stewart or an Ian McKellen back onto a screen is already built and already explained to the audience. Everything the Doomsday roster is about to do walks through the door this film opened. I didn’t clock that at the time because it doesn’t announce itself: the Void plays as a set for a third act rather than as a piece of continuity engineering. Watching it now, knowing what it enabled, the Void is the most consequential thing in the movie and Cassandra Nova is very nearly a distraction from it.
Almost. She’s still the best thing in it
I said in 2024 that Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova was playing at a level most Marvel villains never reach and I’d go considerably further now. Across everything I’ve rewatched for this project she’s comfortably the strongest antagonist of the era and it isn’t close. The reason holds up on a second viewing: she doesn’t want anything from the audience. No quips, no charm offensive, no tragic backstory deployed at the ninety-minute mark to buy sympathy. She’s a telepath who enjoys her work, and the film trusts that to be enough on its own. It’s a genuine shame she’s stuck in a film most people file under comedy, because she’d have anchored something a great deal heavier.
The rule I was most curious about revisiting was the anchor being, because that’s exactly the kind of invented cosmology franchises abandon the moment it gets inconvenient. A universe dies when its anchor being dies: clean, dramatic, and enormously restrictive if you actually keep it. They mostly haven’t kept it. It’s never been contradicted outright, but nothing since has leaned on it either, and the incursion framing that’s been driving everything toward December runs on completely different rules. Anchor beings were a device to justify one film’s plot and they’ve been quietly left where they were. I don’t hold that against the movie, which needed a reason for Wade to go looking for a Logan and invented a good one. But anybody expecting that rule to govern how universes work in December is going to be disappointed.
The Logan question, two years on
I argued in 2024 that the variant framing meant this didn’t cheapen Logan and I still think that’s right. What’s changed is my confidence about why. At the time it felt like a technicality that happened to work out. Now, having watched a great deal of this era back to back, I can see how genuinely rare that restraint is. The easy move was to bring back the Logan people cried over. The film specifically didn’t, and it took on a harder story as a result: a Wolverine whose defining trait is failure rather than fury, which is much less fun to watch and considerably more interesting to sit with. Jackman is better in this than he was in several of the films where he was the lead, which is a strange thing to be true of what is technically a legacy cameo.
The thing I most want to correct from the period review is a matter of emphasis. I described the cameos as a eulogy for characters who never got a proper ending and treated that as a nice gesture. It was much more than a gesture. Going into Doomsday with Stewart, McKellen and Grammer actually returning, this is the moment the franchise decided the Fox era counted — not as a curiosity to be rebooted past, but as history worth carrying forward. That’s a real editorial position and the film took it two years before anybody had to formally commit to it. Blade’s scene lands differently now too. In 2024 it was a nice moment for an underappreciated actor. In 2026, with the Fox generation being welcomed back onto the board, it looks like the opening line of a much larger argument about who gets to be part of this story at all.
What to know going in
If you’re coming to this cold as December preparation, be aware the film assumes a great deal. Not MCU knowledge exactly, though there’s plenty of that too. It assumes you have opinions about a set of films from the 2000s and 2010s that an awful lot of people have never seen, and the emotional payload of half the cameos depends on remembering a franchise that got cancelled or a character who deserved better. If you don’t carry that history, those scenes read as random people arriving to applause you’re not part of. That’s a design decision rather than a flaw, and it’s why the film lands so hard for those of us who were there, but it does mean it works much less well as an entry point than its box office would suggest. Watch the first Deadpool and, if you possibly can, Logan, and most of what matters will land.
In 2024 I rated it top of my list for the year and gave it four and a half or five, and I’d hold that. What I’d add is that it’s aged better than almost everything around it for the same reason Guardians Vol. 3 has: it’s a complete film with a beginning, a middle and an actual ending, and it isn’t holding a promissory note for a sequel that may never arrive. Watch it again before December. Not for the plot, which you’ll remember perfectly well, but for how much of what’s about to happen was quietly assembled here while everybody was busy laughing.