Whatever they did to me made me completely indestructible – Wade Wilson
Marvel’s fourth wall-shattering, immoral, sweary bear has literally become the stuff that box-office dreams are made of.
The costumed avenger who pushed the superhero film into adults-only territory is one of the most unlikely, and unlikeable according to some of his closest friends, superheroes to ever don a mask and stand up for the little guy against the forces of darkness.
Sure, he doesn’t always do it out of the goodness of his heart, and more often than not there’s some sort of financial reward involved, but nine times out of ten whenever evil threatens to engulf mankind, Deadpool will be there to stop it.
Okay, so maybe it’s more like seven times out of ten, but when he does show up you can bet that Deadpool won’t just be there in spirit, he’ll be a katana swinging, all guns blazing, take no prisoners force of do-gooding nature that no ne’er do well will ever be able to escape.
Wade Wilson was always motivated by selfishness, it’s what made the self-styled merc with a mouth volunteer for the Weapon-X program when he discovered that he had terminal cancer.
We know, his origin story is a lot more romantic in the first Deadpool movie than it is in the comics, but he’s also a much more loveable character when Ryan Reynolds is in the driving seat too so… What point were we trying to make?
Oh yes, that’s right, Wade is a bit of a douchebag in the comic books. He’s funny and oddly charming, but he’s still a douchebag
No, you didn’t misread that last paragraph, Deadpool was a product of the same secretive division of the Canadian military that was responsible for lacing Wolverine’s bones with adamantium and making him indestructible.
And they did the same to Deadpool, they made him indestructible too, they just did it with a “power” that they may or not have stolen from Logan while he was in their care.
A killer by trade, Wade Wilson isn’t a mutant in the traditional sense, as he wasn’t born with his powers, but thanks to the relentless pursuit of mad science in the name of profit, he became a mutant anyway, which is why Colossus spends an unhealthy amount of time trying to recruit him both of the Deadpool films.
You’d have thought he’d have learned his lesson after the first film, but no, apparently Charles Xavier teaches his students that hope springs eternal.
Wade’s primary power is his healing factor, which because it has to permanently keep his incredibly aggressive cancer in check, is even more efficient than Wolverine’s is.
As it works at such an accelerated rate, his healing factor means that no matter what happens to him, whether he’s decapitated, cut in half, blown to pieces (as he was in the first ten minutes of Deadpool 2), Wade will always come back.
Contrary to popular belief, Deadpool can be killed, the problem is that it’s never permanent and rarely lasts more than a couple of minutes.
Killed By Death
It’s his inability to die that made him the perfect instrument of destruction in Deadpool Kills The Marvel Universe in which he, as you’ve probably guessed from the title of the book, killed every other superhero in the Marvel Universe.
He couldn’t be killed, so he couldn’t be stopped, which meant that he was able to fulfill the grizzly task that no other being in the universe could.
Deadpool can’t even kill himself, and believe us he’s tried to on more than the one occasion in Deadpool 2.
In Deadpool Kills Deadpool it’s revealed the Deadpool responsible for wiping out the entire Marvel Universe was in fact an alternate version of Deadpool, called Dreadpool, whose next target is the gung-ho, happy go lucky Deadpool that we’ve come to know and sort of begrudgingly like.
But as hard as Dreadpool tried to kill Deadpool, and vice versa because Wade won’t go down without a fight, neither of them actually manages to kill each other.
And if the one person who knows Deadpool better than anyone else, that person, in this case, being none other than Deadpool, can’t kill him, then no one and nothing can. Not permanently anyway.
Until The Heavens Fade And The Stars Burn Out
If he can’t be killed, he can’t die and if his healing factor cures whatever devastating, and usually incredibly graphic and gory, ills and wounds befall him, does that mean that Deadpool is immortal?
That’s an incredibly insightful question, and yes we suppose it does make him immortal.
Forever is an awfully long time though, and even though Deadpool is still alive in the year 2997, after being locked in a freezer for eight hundred and something years and only emerges to help Cable defeat Stryfe in Messiah War, in the final pages of History Of The Marvel Universe, at the end of time, the only people left alive when the stars finally wink out, are Galactus and Franklin Richards.
It would seem, according to Mark Waid who charted the timeline of the Marvel Universe from beginning to end for the book, that the only things that Wade’s healing factor can’t save him from are entropic decay and the heat death of our reality.
Still, as that’s billions of years away, and Waid doesn’t actually specify when his namesake dies, we’d like to think that Deadpool almost made it to the end of everything.
Is Death The End?
The one thing that we can state with any degree of absolute certainty is that it isn’t the end for Wade Wilson. He won’t stay dead no matter what happens to him, and while he won’t take being killed personally, he isn’t very fond of it when it does happen to him.
He may not live to see the stars burn out, but he is according to the literal definition of the word, immortal thanks to illegal Canadian super-science and a stubborn refusal to go gently, or quietly into that, or any other good night.
