Deadpool 2Save

The film opens with Wade Wilson / Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) celebrating his anniversary with girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), now living together in a shared New York apartment. Wade has been working as a freelance international assassin, traveling to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sicily to eliminate various criminals, drug dealers, and warlords. His career trajectory has been steady upward. The opening anniversary celebration is interrupted when one of Wade's targets has tracked him back to his apartment for a revenge-counter-attack. Wade kills the assassins but Vanessa is shot during the firefight and dies in his arms. Wade's grief at her death drives him to attempt suicide using gasoline, matches, and his own apartment's gas line. His regenerative healing factor prevents the death.

Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) recover Wade's mostly-disintegrated body and bring him to the X-Mansion, where the X-Men attempt to rehabilitate him. Wade, depressed and unwilling, accepts a probationary X-Men role only because it gives him purpose. His first official X-Men mission is to negotiate the surrender of a young mutant named Russell Collins / Firefist (Julian Dennison), who is in front of a Vancouver orphanage in a public mutant-power tantrum. Wade discovers that the orphanage is the Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation, a facility being run as a torture-experimental laboratory by the orphanage director (Eddie Marsan). Wade kills the director in front of Russell, an act for which Wade and Russell are both arrested and incarcerated at the Ice Box, a maximum-security mutant-suppression facility.

At the Ice Box, Wade and Russell are subjected to mutant-suppressor collars that neutralize their healing factor and pyrokinesis respectively. Wade's condition deteriorates as a previously-asymptomatic cancer (the same cancer his original transformation had cured) returns to threaten his life. The Ice Box facility is attacked by Cable (Josh Brolin), a time-traveling mutant soldier from a dystopian future, whose mission is to assassinate Russell at the Ice Box specifically. Cable's reasoning: in his future timeline, an adult Russell Firefist will become a mass-murderer who killed Cable's wife and daughter. Cable has traveled back in time to kill Russell as a teenager before the murders occur. Wade defends Russell during the attack, allowing both of them to escape the facility into a transport convoy.

Wade decides to assemble a team to rescue Russell from Cable's continued pursuit. The recruitment montage introduces several new characters: Bedlam (Terry Crews), an electromagnetic-field manipulator; Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), an alien-warrior with bladed forearms; the Vanisher (an invisible team member who is never visually shown until his death); Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgård), an acid-vomiting mutant; Domino (Zazie Beetz), whose superpower is supernaturally-good luck; and Peter (Rob Delaney), an ordinary middle-aged accountant who responded to Wade's recruitment ad and has no superpowers whatsoever. The team is named X-Force.

The X-Force's first deployment is a parachute drop onto the moving prisoner-transport convoy where Russell and Wade have been captured by Cable. The drop is the film's most-discussed comedic sequence: Bedlam, Shatterstar, the Vanisher, and Zeitgeist are all killed in sequence by the unforgiving wind currents and various ground hazards (electrical lines, helicopter blades, woodchipper) immediately upon landing. Only Domino, whose luck-based powers safely guide her to the convoy, and Peter, who survives by improbable accident, reach the actual fight. Wade, surveying the carnage, accepts that the X-Force concept needs to be redesigned with people whose deaths he can prevent.

Cable's pursuit of Russell continues despite Wade's intervention. Cable and Wade's brief temporary alliance forms when Wade convinces Cable that killing Russell as a teenager will not solve Cable's underlying problem; the trauma that turns Russell into a mass-murderer can be prevented by intervention rather than execution. The pivot point is the Essex House orphanage director, whom Russell is tracking for revenge. If Russell kills the orphanage director, his moral character is irrevocably altered toward murder; if Wade can prevent that first killing, Russell's future trajectory shifts.

The third-act climax takes place at the Essex House orphanage, where Russell has confronted the orphanage director (whom Wade had previously believed dead) for a public revenge killing. Wade, accompanied by Cable, Domino, and the surviving X-Force members, arrives at the scene. Cable's primary mission has now switched to preventing Russell's first murder rather than killing Russell. Wade physically interposes himself between Russell and the orphanage director, taking a fatal flame-attack from Russell's pyrokinesis. Wade's mutant healing factor has been neutralized by a suppressor collar he has been wearing for the cancer-management protocol, and he genuinely dies of his injuries.

The film's emotional climax is Wade's death sequence, which Ryan Reynolds plays straight rather than for comedy. Wade reunites with Vanessa in an afterlife sequence intercut with the X-Force's grief at his physical death. Cable, having seen the chain of moral choices Wade has made, uses his time-travel device's last remaining power-charge to travel briefly into the past and place a bullet-stopping coin into Wade's vest pocket. The coin deflects the fatal flame-attack just enough to allow Wade's healing factor to recover before death is final. Wade reawakens. The Vanessa-afterlife scene is retroactively recontextualized as a near-death experience.

The film's epilogue includes the franchise's most-discussed post-credits sequence. Negasonic Teenage Warhead and her girlfriend Yukio repair Cable's time-travel device, allowing Wade to use it for personal-pleasure time-travel adventures. Wade travels back to multiple points in his own timeline to alter past events: he saves Vanessa from being shot in the opening sequence (their relationship is restored without the loss); he travels to the set of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and kills the previous version of Deadpool that appeared in that film; he kills Ryan Reynolds before Reynolds can sign the contract for Green Lantern (2011). Deadpool 2 grossed $785 million globally on a $110 million budget, exceeding the original's box-office and confirming the R-rated superhero subgenre's commercial viability.

Director David Leitch, a former stunt-coordinator-turned-filmmaker whose prior credits included John Wick (2014, uncredited co-direction) and Atomic Blonde (2017), brought a heightened-action sensibility to the sequel that distinguished it stylistically from Tim Miller's original. Leitch's stunt-coordination background was particularly evident in the parachute drop, the prison transport convoy fight, and the orphanage-confrontation climax. Josh Brolin's Cable performance, his second major Marvel role of 2018 (he had played Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War two months earlier), was praised for its grounded gravity in contrast to Wade's manic comedy. Zazie Beetz's Domino became a popular character despite her relatively limited screen time; her supernatural-luck power was depicted through extended single-shot sequences in which fortunate near-misses cascade into elaborate chain reactions of beneficial coincidence.

The film's many comic-book references and meta-jokes referenced the broader Fox-Marvel cinematic universe in ways that retroactively-recontextualized the Deadpool character as a kind of franchise self-critic. The X-Mansion sequence, which opens at the actual Cerebro chamber but is briefly populated by the same X-Men cast members from the X-Men trilogy, jokes about the fact that the X-Men cinema franchise had famously rotated its cast multiple times across its run. Wade's repeated frustration that none of the major X-Men ever appear when he visits the Mansion is one of the running gags that became a template for the franchise's self-aware humor. Deadpool 2 also notably introduced the X-Force concept, which Wade jokes about throughout the film and which would not be properly assembled until Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) brought additional cameo participants.