T-minus 24 days and counting until the Merc with Mouth and “the X-Man,” Logan (Hugh Jackman), enters the Marvel Cinematic Universe for what's sure to be one hell of a ride. Deadpool & Wolverine is without question the most highly anticipated film dropping this summer — possibly the entire year — but the superhero movie’s titular star, Ryan Reynolds, wasn’t certain he’d ever suit up again as Wade Wilson’s red-clad, anti-hero alter ego, Deadpool. Reynolds said in an interview (per Entertainment Weekly):

I didn't know if I'd ever be playing Deadpool again. It's not something I would've said necessarily publicly, but I didn't know how a character like that would fit into that world [Marvel Cinematic Universe].

Once the MCU acquired and absorbed the X-Men related characters, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige realized the enormous potential that could ultimately not only entice the comic book fandom, but lead to significant dollar signs down the road. As the world existed before the acquisition took place, Wolverine and Deadpool never could have interacted with characters like Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man or Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange: Nods to both have been shown off in the teasers and trailers promoting Deadpool and Wolverine. Feige said via the same source:

"I don't want to get into corporate acquisition legal laws or whatever. I don't understand them, but there's a lot of 'em. It took a long time between whenever [the acquisition] was announced to it all getting done, so [the characters] weren't really in our sandbox for a very long time after that first announcement happened."

Feige continued:

The notion that, all these years later, we're in a world where [Jackman] is Wolverine, and Deadpool and all of those X-Men characters are together under the same roof, is a pretty amazing quarter-of-a-century experience.

Cassandra Nova Is ‘Not Technically Xavier's Twin’

Emma Corrin didn’t know practically anything about Marvel before signing on to portray Deadpool & Wolverine’s villainous Cassandra Nova. And for those who aren’t staunch comic book readers and/or diehards, some fans might not know that Cassandra is the Mummudrai of the X-Men’s Charles Xavier, aka Professor X. However, Nova is NOT Xavier’s twin, at least in the MCU. Corrin revealed a bit about their Deadpool 3 villain via the same source:

“She's not technically Xavier's twin, but rather an alien parasite that appeared to Xavier in utero and formed into his polar opposite. Ryan [Reynolds] and Shawn [Levy] pitched this idea, which I was totally on board with: 'We want this villain to not be a villain in the sense that you expect them to be.’”

Corrin continued (below):

“‘We want you to be so endeared by her, so charmed by her. And just when you think that maybe she's totally seen into your soul, and you are going to be best friends for life, you're dead.' They wanted her to be unpredictable. He's so disarmingly polite and nice and unaffected, and it's really creepy. It's all the more sinister because he doesn't need to do anything.”

Nova can be seen wielding her awesome powers in the footage promoting Deadpool & Wolverine online. Cassandra’s presence in the film isn’t a secret, nor are the appearances of former X-Men stars like Aaron Stanford and Tyler Mane, who portrayed Pyro and Sabretooth respectively in the movie franchise prior to the MCU. And many more cameos, characters and surprises are going to pop up in Deadpool 3, but director Shawn Levy warns that he didn't want those special “cameos or characters to be the story of the movie.” Levy said:

"We didn't want any of the cameos or characters to be the story of the movie. But they are peppered in throughout. There's a lot of characters. The internet is a delight of rumors about the multitude of character cameos that are in this movie. Some rumors are true, some are way off base. Wade [Wilson] himself is a fan.

Without giving anything away about the various universes the different characters live in…. because he's in some ways a fawning motormouthed little fanboy himself, it allows the movie to call out and reference a ton of deep-cut Marvel references."