If Cassandra Nova really is in Deadpool & Wolverine, what does that mean for the plot?

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Deadpool & Wolverine looks really fun in its first trailer and equally mysterious with all those multiversal elements. But is that really Cassandra Nova as the movie's main villain?

Carefully going through the trailer, we've already been able to extract a possible Patch cameo and a potentially meaningful Secret Wars Easter egg. Another highlight for comic book aficionados is a brief shot from behind of a bald character (around 1:16) who many viewers think could be a Professor X variant. But this is, very likely, a deeper cut.

Word on the street regarding Cassandra Nova as Emma Corrin's role in the ensemble have been floating for a while now, and this first look at the threequel adds more fuel to the fire. Plus, honestly, it's easy to see Corrin pulling off the Charles Xavier look.

While most of the plot is being kept under wraps, a good chunk of the trailer is spent setting up Deadpool as some kind of multiversal hero used by the TVA (maybe as an alternative to being locked away or pruned) to fix something that's broken. We get to see a bunch of mysterious characters, even including the Pyro cameo no one was expecting, and the overall feeling is that the main threat is very much mutant-related (which would also justify Hugh Jackman's return as Wolverine).

So, who's Cassandra Nova? Well, she's by far one of the strangest Marvel villains of all time, making her first appearance in New X-Men #114 (2001). Long story short: She's what the Shi'ar call 'Mummudrai' or anti-self, the spirit that is the equal and opposite of a person, entities who live in the Astral Plane that each individual must fight before being born.

In the case of Charles Xavier, because of his genetic potential, his Mummudrai was too strong, fought him, and managed to survive in a physical form. Eventually, she'd show up as an evil twin of sorts and influence mutant hate crimes all over the world before moving on to larger plans.

What could she be after in Deadpool & Wolverine? Well, with all her potential (an evil version of Charles Xavier is very bad news for everyone) and the multiverse having more and more incursions and the Multiverse Saga progresses, she might be planning to take over and cleanse not just one Earth but several. Another option is that her rise is a byproduct of Deadpool directly messing with the timelines following the hilarious Deadpool 2 post-credit scenes, thus pushing the TVA to make him clean his mess.

Either way, it looks like Deadpool & Wolverine will double down on some of the lesser-known (for casual audiences) characters of the Marvel comics, and we're here for it.

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