Deadpool 2Save

Cold open. Wade Wilson's anniversary night with Vanessa. The same Brooklyn apartment from Deadpool (2016). Wade has been a successful, married, semi-retired Deadpool for months. He's been ambushing international criminals across the world and earning a small mercenary fortune that he and Vanessa have been planning to use to retire to a small Argentine villa. On their second wedding anniversary, Wade and Vanessa are at home discussing baby plans — she's been trying to convince him to start a family. He's been hesitant. Then a small-time criminal Wade had been hunting earlier that week breaks into the apartment and shoots wildly. Vanessa is shot in the chest. Wade can't save her with his healing factor — the bullet was a deliberate non-impact-trauma headshot. She dies in his arms within seconds. The cold open is brutal. The film's tone shifts hard. Wade has lost the person he was using as his emotional center.

Wade's suicide. Wade Wilson tries to kill himself. He pours gasoline on his body and lights himself on fire. He throws himself off the Brooklyn Bridge. He puts his head into a microwave. None of it works because Wade has the strongest healing factor in the multiverse — he physically cannot die. He keeps regenerating. He keeps surviving. He spends two months in this state — eating his own healed organs, getting blown apart, regenerating, doing it again. He's in hell. He's been visited in his hallucinations by Vanessa multiple times — she's been telling him she's still around, in a kind of afterlife, and he should keep going. He doesn't want to keep going.

Colossus interventions. Colossus (Stefan Kapičić, Russian mutant, the noble X-Men member from the first Deadpool film) finds Wade in his shattered apartment and drags him bodily to the X-Mansion in Westchester. The X-Mansion is empty — every other X-Men character is busy in plot-stuff happening offscreen — and only Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and Negasonic's new girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna) are home. Colossus offers Wade the X-Men's full membership. Wade reluctantly agrees, deciding Vanessa would have wanted him to be a hero. He becomes an X-Men trainee for the first time.

Russell Collins. Wade's first X-Men mission is a recruitment-extraction at the Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation — a Christian-cult-style orphanage in Vermont that has been allegedly converting young mutant children to deny their abilities. The X-Men have received a tip that a teenage pyrokinetic mutant named Russell Collins (Julian Dennison, the New Zealand actor from Hunt for the Wilderpeople), age 14, is being abused at the orphanage. Wade, Colossus, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead arrive. Russell — angry, traumatized, in flame-pyrokinesis form — has been beating up the orphanage's staff. The headmaster has been physically and emotionally abusing him for years. Wade kills the headmaster against Colossus's orders. Colossus is horrified by Wade's casual murder. Wade and Russell are both arrested. Both are fitted with power-dampening collars and sent to the Ice Box — a maximum-security mutant prison.

Cable. Cable (Josh Brolin) — a cybernetically-augmented soldier from the year 2080 — has been time-jumping back to 2018 to assassinate the teenage Russell. In Cable's future, Russell grows up to murder Cable's wife and daughter. Cable has been tracking Russell for months. He arrives at the Ice Box prison and breaches the facility, killing dozens of guards with cybernetic-arm weapons. Wade engages Cable in the prison cell. Cable is a one-man army — too strong for Wade's regular combat tactics. Russell escapes from the prison during the chaos. Cable disappears in pursuit. Wade is left in the demolished prison.

X-Force assembly. Wade, recovering from the prison battle, decides he needs an X-Force — a team of mutants who can chase Cable across America and bring Russell home safely. He puts a classified ad in a Brooklyn newspaper looking for mutant volunteers willing to die for $20k each. He receives dozens of applications. He hires six members: Domino (Zazie Beetz, mutant ability is probability — every situation she's in goes in her favor); Bedlam (Terry Crews, an electromagnetic-mutant who disrupts electronics); Shatterstar (Lewis Tan, a Chinese-American mutant with super-reflexes and dual-blade weapons); Vanisher (Brad Pitt, an invisibility-mutant in a brief cameo who is never visible on camera); Peter (Rob Delaney, a human everyman who isn't a mutant at all but who answered the ad because he has nothing better to do); and Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgård, a mutant who can vomit corrosive acid at will). Wade's X-Force assembles in a Brooklyn warehouse for a parachuting briefing.

X-Force's catastrophic deployment. The X-Force parachutes onto an Ice Box prisoner-transport convoy moving through a Brooklyn neighborhood. The parachuting goes catastrophically wrong because of the unexpected wind. Bedlam crashes into a building and his neck breaks. Shatterstar lands on an exposed helicopter blade and gets shredded. Zeitgeist lands on an industrial concrete-grinder and gets pulped. Vanisher (invisible the entire mission) lands on a high-voltage power line and is electrocuted to death — the only time the audience sees him is when his charred-skeleton lands on the asphalt. Peter (the non-mutant everyman) survives only because Domino's probability-luck protects him. The X-Force has been reduced from six to three (Wade, Domino, Peter) in two minutes of pure dark comedy. Wade and Domino reach the Ice Box convoy.

Convoy fight. Wade and Domino fight Cable and his stolen prisoner-transport convoy across the Brooklyn streets. Domino's probability powers allow her to dodge bullets, ricochet shots into specific targets, and navigate the chaos cleanly. The fight ends with Cable escaping with Russell.

Russell at Essex House. Russell, free of Wade's protection, returns to the Essex House orphanage and burns it to the ground in vengeance. He kills the headmaster (despite Wade having already killed him in the first act). Russell discovers a small mutant-prison facility under the Essex House — the orphanage's secret black-ops detention area. Russell finds an imprisoned mutant in a maximum-security cell — Juggernaut (Reynolds, in motion-capture), the unstoppable telepathic-resistance-protected ten-foot-tall fist-of-fury super-strong mutant from X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). Russell frees Juggernaut. They become a partner-team of villains together.

Wade and Cable team up. Wade and Cable, who have been working at cross-purposes, finally negotiate. Cable will help Wade and Domino save Russell from his own anger — they need Russell to redeem himself rather than to kill him. They drive to the burning Essex House to confront Russell and Juggernaut. The final battle is at the Essex House's orphanage building, surrounded by burning grass and dozens of trapped young mutants.

Final battle. Juggernaut is essentially unkillable — he's been built up as cinema's strongest mutant. Colossus arrives to engage Juggernaut directly. The two unstoppable-force-vs-immovable-object metal-mutants fight across the Essex House lawn in a massive Russian-vs-British metal-on-metal slugfest. Negasonic Teenage Warhead disables the Essex House's mutant-power-dampening collars from the building's basement (Wade and Russell had been collar-restrained the entire time). Wade is decapitated by Juggernaut and his head falls off. Wade's healing factor reverses the decapitation. He puts his head back on. Russell is about to kill the headmaster again with another fire-blast.

Cable's last-second decision. Cable, with his time-jump device's last charge ready to send him back to 2080, has been about to assassinate Russell. He's been planning this moment for two years. He raises his cybernetic-arm rifle. Wade, in front of Russell, takes Cable's bullet through the chest while wearing the Ice Box power-dampening collar (which prevents his healing factor from working). Wade dies on the burning lawn. Cable lowers his weapon, realizing his mistake. Wade reunites with Vanessa in a small heavenly diner. They have their farewell.

Cable's sacrifice. Cable, broken by the realization he was about to kill a child to save his own daughter, uses his time-jump device's last charge — the charge he had been saving for his return trip home — to reverse Wade's death. He travels back to a moment ten seconds earlier. He intercepts the bullet by placing Vanessa's gold-token necklace (which Wade had been wearing) in the path of the bullet. The token deflects the round. Wade survives. Cable is now permanently stranded in 2018. Wade negotiates with Russell directly: Russell can choose his own life path. Russell, finally listening, lowers his fire-fists. He decides not to kill the headmaster. The headmaster — beaten by Wade in the first act, brought back somehow — is now alive and Russell decides to spare him. The film's redemption arc closes.

Aftermath. Wade, Russell, Cable, and Colossus take Negasonic and Yukio to a small American-diner celebration. Wade announces the team as the new X-Force. Cable, despite being stranded, agrees to stay and help them. The X-Mansion is full of new mutants now. Wade is part of a family again.

End credits. The famous end-credits Easter eggs. Wade has somehow gotten his hands on Cable's time-jump device. The device's charge has been restored offscreen. Wade time-jumps back to multiple points in history and changes them: He travels to the early-1990s set of Wade Wilson's first appearance (which had been X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)'s Deadpool — a deeply-disappointing version of the character) and shoots the on-set Deadpool actor with his pistol, retroactively erasing the bad X-Men Origins: Wolverine Deadpool from existence. He travels to a 2010 audition reading of Green Lantern (2011) and shoots a younger Ryan Reynolds in the head before Reynolds can sign the contract — preventing the disastrous Green Lantern film from being made. The end-credits sequence is widely-cited as the funniest end-credits stinger in superhero film history.