X-Force, Deadpool 2's new superhero team, explained
Deadpool 2 features the cinematic debut of a long-running Marvel comics team. Here's everything you need to know about them. Mild spoilers ahead.
- Once wrote 50 articles in one month.
Back in 1983, Marvel released New Mutants, an X-Men spin-off comic book to complement its extremely successful Uncanny X-men comic. The comic ran until 1991, when it was replaced with X-Force and most of the characters from New Mutants continued their stories in the new X-Force comic.
X-Force differed from the X-Men in that they were more of a militaristic strikeforce led initially by Cable. The complete list of original members included:
- Cable
- Domino (kinda)*
- Shatterstar
- Cannonball
- Boom Boom
- Feral
- Warpath
*Spoiler for a 27-year-old comic: A few issues into the first X-Force it was revealed that the Domino on the team wasn't actually Domino, but a super villain known as Copycat who had nefariously taken on Domino's identity.
In 2008, the book was retooled with an even more black ops team that was OK with killing threats. It initially included the members:
- Wolverine
- X-23
- Warpath
- Wolfsbane
In 2010, the book was replaced with Uncanny X-Force with the following roster:
- Wolverine
- Deadpool
- Psylocke
- Fantomex
- Archangel
This was actually my favorite incarnation of X-Force as it took on a much darker and more serious tone. The team's first mission was to assassinate a young child who might eventually grow up to become an evil mutant super villain. The moral quandaries and resulting tense character interaction made for some really entertaining, well-written moments.
Domino's one of the founding members of X-Force in the comics and the movies.
There were plenty of other incarnations of the team over the years, but the ones above felt like the most pivotal. The last run of X-Force ran from 2014 through 2015. There is currently no X-Force comic in publication.
In Deadpool 2, Ryan Reynold's Deadpool brings together his own X-Force that consists of the following team members, not including Deadpool.
- Domino (Zazie Beetz)
- Bedlam (Terry Crews)
- Shatterstar (Lewis Tan)
- Vanisher (spoiler)
- Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgard)
- Peter (Rob Delaney)
The team's first outing is one of the highlights of the film. However, to avoid spoilers, the less I say about it the better. There is actually an X-Force movie in the works from Fox to be written and directed by Drew Goddard. Goddard previously co-wrote (with Joss Whedon) Cabin in the Woods, a movie everyone needs to see because it's amazing.
Choosing X-Force team members is hard!
The X-Force movie doesn't currently have a release date, but Ryan Reynolds will reportedly reprise his Deadpool role. No additional cast members have been confirmed as of yet.
Will we see the same roster we saw in Deadpool 2? Who knows. The lists above are really just scratching the surface. Over its near 25 years in publication, X-Force has seen a ton of different characters come and go and then come back again and go again. So Fox and Goddard have a lot of cool characters to choose from.
And to maybe confuse matters a bit, there's also a New Mutants movie slated for release on August 2, 2019. Whether it will cross over with X-Force, however, remains to be seen.
Deadpool 2 kills all expectations, if you ignore the first half: The movie takes too long to get to its best meta jokes and gleeful violence, but once it does, it proves to be a worthy sequel.
Deadpool 2 post-credits scene(s), explained: There are five different Deadpool 2 post-credits scenes and they're all wonderful. Here's what they mean and signal.