Deadpool & Wolverine’s smallest cameo points out what the movie is missing

The emotional heart of Deadpool & Wolverine is nestled in a Polaroid picture the Merc with a Mouth (Ryan Reynolds) carries with him.

That photo contains his “entire world”: his surrogate family and friends, consisting of nine people. They include his estranged wife Vanessa (Morena Baccarin); his best friend Peter (Rob Delaney); his roommate Blind Al (Leslie Uggams); his taxi driver and mentee Dopinder (Karan Soni); recurring extra Buck (Randal Reeder); and mutants Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), and Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna).

The ninth member of this assemblage is… Well, that’s a small spoiler for one small, unexplained gag in Deadpool & Wolverine, but for those who don’t want to know about any of the cameos going in, you’ve been warned.

[Ed. note: Small Deadpool & Wolverine cameo spoiler ahead.]

The ninth person making up Wade Wilson’s entire world is Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), the cult X-Men character created by writer Fabian Nicieza and artist Rob Liefeld. Including him among Wade’s nearest and dearest is strange for a number of reasons: Shatterstar wasn’t particularly close to Deadpool in either of the prior films. His presence draws attention to the more significant characters who are absent from the gathering. Also, he died as a punchline in the middle of Deadpool 2, after only a few minutes of screentime.

Like so many minor heroes in the MCU, Shatterstar has an insanely convoluted backstory: He’s a mutant raised in an alternate universe who arrived on Earth as an alien. Even his powers are unnecessarily complicated. But the character summed them up well in his first live-action appearance in Deadpool 2: “I’m basically better than you — at everything.”

In that film, Shatterstar was introduced as a member of Deadpool’s short-lived X-Force team, alongside Peter, Domino (Zazie Beetz), Bedlam (Terry Crews), Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgård) and the Vanisher (Brad Pitt). Deadpool assembled the team to protect the young mutant Russell (Julian Dennison) from the time-traveling Cable (Josh Brolin), but also as a self-aware gag about how superhero films tend to be built to spawn franchises. In Deadpool’s words, he built a team that was “tough, morally flexible, and young enough so they can carry this franchise 10 to 12 years.”

X-Force is one of the best jokes in Deadpool 2, even if it’s ultimately an expanded riff on a similar gag in MacGruber. X-Force leaps into action, only for the movie to immediately and graphically kill all of them except Deadpool and Domino before they can even intercept Cable. The joke has aged well in hindsight, with the film teasing an overload of fan service, only to deliver a wry punchline. X-Force is irrelevant to the story Deadpool 2 is telling, and the film’s writers — Reynolds, working with frequent collaborators Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — shrewdly realize this.

But that makes it particularly weird to see Deadpool & Wolverine give this dead minor character such a prominent position in Wade Wilson’s life. Peter also died in Deadpool 2, but the mid-credits scene shows Deadpool using time travel to save him. Shatterstar doesn’t get the same treatment. And Deadpool 2 stresses Deadpool’s dislike of the hero. After the team dies in the original timeline, Deadpool tells Domino, “The good news is: I don’t think anyone’s gonna miss Shatterstar. He was a bit of a prick.”

On The Empire Film Podcast after the release of Deadpool 2, Reynolds stated that the creative intention of that sequence is that Deadpool only saved Peter, even though he could have rescued the others as well. Still, continuity is elastic in these movies. Deadpool & Wolverine is full of cameos from half-forgotten or never-were characters from elsewhere in the pre-MCU Marvel movie universe. Nitpicking a given background joke cameo is missing the forest for the trees.

Still, there’s an inherent strangeness to Shatterstar turning up here unheralded, as practically the only gag in the movie that Deadpool doesn’t explain or point out to the audience. It also stands out, given how Deadpool & Wolverine utterly ignores the far more significant cast members from Deadpool 2. The end of that movie stressed that he’d built a surrogate family, including Domino, Cable, and Russell — all of whom are missing without comment in Deadpool & Wolverine. Their absence is felt, and Shatterstar’s inclusion draws attention to it.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that he was folded into Deadpool & Wolverine as part of a larger gag that got cut. Then again, maybe his appearance is functioning as intended: just a low-key blink-and-you-miss-it gag. The entire film is a museum honoring franchise history: Happy’s office is decorated with trophies from previous MCU entries. The Void is littered with relics from Fox’s now-defunct Marvel properties. Deadpool keeps turning to the camera and reminding us about Marvel history.

Amid all that, Shatterstar stands out as a weird blip — either a lost opportunity for a bigger joke, or a gag that never lands. Deadpool 2 didn’t make particularly significant use of Shatterstar as a character, but it did at least employ him in service of a funny punchline about superhero franchises. In Deadpool & Wolverine, he’s barely another conversation piece.