This week the merger between 21st Century Fox and Disney became official. This makes Disney an even more powerful force in Hollywood than it was before, largely due to the catalog of characters and franchises it just took ownership of. One of those characters is Deadpool and now that he's joined the rest of his Marvel brethren, it seems they're all quite happy to have him on board. Chris Hemsworth seems especially happy, based on the way the Thor actor welcomed both the character and the actor behind him.
Chris Hemsworth shared a piece of fan art on Instagram which shows, what Hemsworth calls, the love child of Thor and Deadpool. It's really just the Merc with a Mouth wearing a funny piece of headgear and carrying a tiny little hammer, because one assumes he couldn't actually lift the full sized one. Also, it appears Deadpool has joined the Avengers, which, considering the trouble DP had with the X-Men, I'm going to guess is not going to go very well.
Looming behind Deadpool are those three little circles that symbolize his new lord and master. The film rights to the character are now back in the hands of Marvel, making him and the rest of Marvel's mutants all characters that could now potentially make their way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While this is certainly expected to happen at some point, it's anybody's guess how it will all shake out. Unless somebody had been planning for this eventuality in advance, a movie that actually inserts Deadpool into a story with the Avengers is at least a couple of years away.
It's probably even further off because, while we have no idea what Marvel has in store for the next phase of the MCU, the studio has clearly been working on things and probably isn't looking to throw out all their work in order to start over and add in the X-Men. We could see an entire phase of the MCU, including several films over the next several years, come to pass before anything significant happens to bring these characters together on screen.
That doesn't mean we won't be seeing Deadpool sooner. His movies have been largely standalone stories anyway and they've also been incredibly successful. While the future of Deadpool and the status of the X-Force movie and/or Deadpool 3 hasn't been exactly clear, I would fully expect to see some sort of Ryan Reynolds Deadpool project move forward sooner rather than later. Why would you have this guys sit on the sidelines when there is clearly money to be made?
While Disney is already making a lot of changes on the business side of things following the merger, we probably won't hear a lot about plans on the content side until after the house is order behind the scenes. Though if we can get Taika Waititi to direct a Thor sequel co-starring Ryan Reynolds on the release schedule, I'm in.
