Deadpool & Wolverine introduced an all-new concept to the multiverse. Logan‘s Wolverine was an “anchor being” whose heroic sacrifice sent his entire timeline on a path of natural annihilation. Wade Wilson and “the best” Wolverine managed to reverse Earth-10005’s destruction and save it, but no one at the TVA knows exactly how they managed to do that. They better figure it out soon, though. Otherwise the entire multiverse might collapse. The movie raised an obvious question with potentially huge ramifications for the franchise’s prime universe, Earth-616: Was Tony Stark the MCU’s anchor being?
One of the best things about Deadpool & Wolverine is that it didn’t worry about canon, timelines, or even internal logic. But Marvel Studios certainly does care about all of those things, and the MCU will need to make sense of the movie’s most intriguing-yet-illogical concepts if they come up again. And none of Deadpool & Wolverine‘s ideas are as important as anchor beings. None are as inherently confusing, either.
Matthew Macfayden’s rogue TVA agent Paradox told Wade Wilson that an anchor being “is an entity of such vital importance that when they die their whole world slowly withers out of existence.” In Earth-10005’s universe Logan was that entity. His death put the entire universe on a path of self-destruction. That would have taken roughly 2,000 years, a fate Paradox planned to speed up with a time ripper.
The existence of anchor beings worked just fine for Deadpool & Wolverine‘s purposes, but they raise issues for the MCU at large. The most obvious is that Wolverine was never immortal. He was always going to die at some point, which would means his universe was always doomed. Plus, if every anchor being’s death leads to their world’s death, every single timeline is always destined for self-destruction. (Unless it has an immortal anchor being.)
That’s if you accept an anchor being’s death should even matter at all. As the TVA has shown, universes exist on a time loop. Essentially those entities are both always alive and always dead. Why should it matter “when” they die?
The only way to explain any of that is by focusing on the nature of Logan’s death and what we learned about the nature of the Sacred Timeline from Loki.
Paradox described the self-sacrifice of Earth-10005’s Wolverine’s as “so epic that it sent shivers down the timeline.” Logan’s death was apparently so heroic and so powerful his timeline couldn’t handle the aftershock of what he’d done. It responded by slowly imploding on itself. That’s exactly why how he died is what matters, not merely that he died.
The TVA never discussed any of this previously, but the agency has gone deep on an equivalent calamity. We’ve witnessed universes exploding via chaotic branching that threatened the entire Sacred Timeline. That happens because a special Variant in that universe causes a Nexus Event.
Why do some Variants cause Nexus Events while others don’t? The TVA has never explained this (and possibly doesn’t even understand itself). Sylvie spent her whole life not knowing why the Time Variance Authority wanted to send her to the Void. All we know—and all that has ever mattered—is that a Nexus-causing Variant’s very existence is an existential threat to their universe. Same as an anchor being’s death.
Those are two different sides of the same coin. A specific life can causes a universe to explode and a specific death can cause a universe to implode. But only if that death is so powerful it acts as a reverse Nexus event.
You know, the exact kind of death Tony Stark had on Earth-616. The central universe on the Sacred Timeline, the one that holds the entire multiverse together, was only saved when Iron Man, a father, husband, friend, and hero, gave up his life. And just like Wolverine was “the X-Man” in Fox’s cinematic universe, Tony Stark was “the Avenger” in his, where he launched the entire franchise.
If anyone is/was/will prove to be Earth-616’s anchor being, it’s the late Tony Stark. And if he was, that means the universe he gave his life to protect is now slowly dying because of his sacrifice. And it will die unless Hunter B-15 and the rest of the TVA can figure out how Deadpool and Wolverine saved Earth-10005. Until they do that most sacred universe is also vulnerable to other threats, just as Deadpool’s was to Paradox’s schemes.
So was Tony Stark the MCU’s anchor being? Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige is glad fans are already asking that question. Why wouldn’t he be? Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t care about the logic of anchor beings, but the rest of franchise will. And with Robert Downey Jr. set to return to the MCU as Victor Von Doom, the death of Tony Stark has never been more important to the future of the entire multiverse.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist happy to be on summer break from MCU homework. You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.