As Marvel Studios begins to make their final preparations for The Merc With A Mouth’s upcoming multiversal road trip, a new copyright filing for Deadpool & Wolverine has provided fans with the first officially confirmed details regarding the many Marvel characters the duo will encounter in their silver screen team-up.
Said details were first unveiled to the public courtesy of the threequel’s official registration filing with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Therein, as part of the film’s official ‘description of work’, Marvel Studios provided the government institution with a brief snapshot of Deadpool & Wolverine‘s principal cast.
According to the record, alongside Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, and Morena Baccarin as Wade’s wife Vanessa, the crossover film will also feature Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova, the villainous twin sister of Professor Xavier, and Jennifer Garner as her previous cinematic incarnation (as seen in the 2003 Daredevil and 2005 Elektra films) of the sai-wielding assassin Elektra Natchios.
Notably, Corrin’s confirmed casting as Nova lends massive credence to recent fan speculation that the bald-headed figure seen in the first Deadpool & Wolverine teaser was, in fact, the mutant psychopath.
While many fans may already be well familiar with the story of Elektra – after all, not only has she been a constant figure in Daredevil’s overall mythos for decades, but she even received both her own aforementioned solo film as well as a major arc in Horn Head’s Netflix series – it’s less likely that they have ever heard of Cassandra Nova.
The creation of writer Grant Morrison (as will soon become abundantly clear) and artist Frank Quitely, Nova began life as Xavier’s ‘astral opposite’, which as per the alien Shi’ar race exist as a sort of ‘first challenge’ for any living being to prove their worth against before being physically born into the real world.
In service of their battle, rather than keeping it to the realm of the incorporeal, Nova instead chooses to take advantage of both her connection to Xavier as well as his latent X-Gene to ‘craft’ herself a physical form, doing so with the intent of joining her brother in utero and killing him at his most vulnerable.
But alas, this plan soon backfires on Nova, as amidst an attempt to choke Xavier with his own umbilical cord, the villain is ‘killed’ when her brother reacts to her murderous intent with a knee-jerk blast of psychic energy, her death ultimately being written off as a miscarriage by their mother.
However, like most X-villains, reports of Nova’s death would eventually turn out to be greatly exaggerated, as after spending the next few decades as nothing more than a clump of cells on a sewer wall, the villain would once again step out into the world with the aim of killing Xavier and everything he every built.
Unfortunately for Marvel’s Merry Band of Mutants, her successive attempts at achieving this goal would prove far more successful than her initial one, as Nova would eventually come to be responsible for not only the infamous Genosha massacre, but also a period of wild instability among the Shi’ar empire.
Eventually defeated by the X-Men, Nova is later revived and given amnesty for her crimes as part of Xavier’s attempt to build a new era of peace among mutants on the island nation of Krakoa.
Yet, though Xavier was willing to extend an olive branch to his ‘sister’, many of his fellow Krakoans were not.
As such, on the orders of Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde, Nova was eventually left stranded two billion years into Earth’s past, her psychic abilities left with absolutely nothing to manipulate and her mind with nothing to do but wait of old age.
To this end, as of writing, it is unknown just how close Deadpool & Wolverine‘s take on Nova will adhere to her original comic book depiction.
For example, with its heavy basis in the Marvel multiverse, could it be possible that the film will avoid the ‘psychic fetus’ angle of Nova’s origin and instead make her a variant of Charles Xavier? Possibly divorce her motives entirely from anything Xavier-related?
As for Garner’s reprisal of her role as Elektra, while admittedly interesting, this reveal comes as little surprise given the aforementioned fact, as relayed by both leaks and Marvel Studios themselves, that the Crimson Comedian’s next adventure has been confirmed to take place across all of Marvel’s cinematic history rather than just the MCU proper.
Ultimately, how Marvel Studios handles both one of the X-Men canon’s most out there villains remains to be seen and the lead of one of their most widely-panned cinematic adaptations when Deadpool & Wolverine slashes its way into cinemas on July 26th.
