Strange things are happening in the geekosphere. Over the past week, there’s been a flurry of activity on Twitter (AKA X) and the internet generally surrounding Taylor Swift’s reported casting (in cameo) as Dazzler in the Marvel movie Deadpool 3. Is it really happening? The original video report by Disinsider that sparked a ream of stories and posts now seems to have excised all references to the singer’s apparent appearance, so we’ll probably have to wait until 2024 to find out.
For the record, Dazzler seems like the perfect fit for Swift. A superhero pop star capable of transforming sound into light and energy beams, she first appeared in the 1980 comic The Uncanny X-Men #130, looking like a disco queen from the stars in tight silver-white spandex and blue mini-mask. The singer’s casting would be an undoubted publicity coup for Marvel, given Swift’s billions of fans across the globe among pretty much all demographics. Moreover, Ryan Reynolds himself has previously said he would love to cast Spotify’s most-streamed female artist in a movie, though it has to be said that similarly pitched stunt-casting hasn’t always worked out in the past.
It was not so long ago that Harry Styles turned up in a post-credits scene for the Marvel bomb Eternals, as superhero Eros, aka Starfox. Sometime brother of the evil Thanos (he of the nefarious, half-the-known-universe-killing finger snap), but with a penchant for womanising rather than mass murder, Eros has even fought alongside The Avengers in print, though they had to give him a new name as all the ogling was getting a bit much. There are rumours that Styles might return in the future, despite Eternals failing to wow audiences, though it will be intriguing to see quite how Marvel goes about finessing a character with such a chequered history for the big screen. His comic book creator, Jim Starlin, recently told Inverse: “I have no idea what they’re going to do with him. I sort of left him as a sociopath, and he is sort of a sexual predator.” Frankly, Swift as Dazzler seems like a much less controversial way to pick up a few extra fans.
Calling all popstars … Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 2. Photograph: Photo Credit: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox/AP
Elsewhere in Disinsider’s report, there are suggestions that Brian Cox could return as Colonel William Stryker in Deadpool 3, alongside Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Ian McKellen as Magneto. The oft-seen rumour that Famke Jansson and Halle Berry will be back as Jean Grey and Storm from the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies is repeated, and there are even hints that Taron Egerton could debut as an alternate version of Wolverine. Coupled with recent shots of Hugh Jackman’s take on the adamantine-clawed mutant spotted in his famous yellow and blue comic book outfit (which was rarely seen in the Fox films) and it’s starting to look like Deadpool 3 might venture heavily into the multiverse.
Does Ryan Reynolds’ titular potty-mouthed antihero somehow help convey Jackman’s Wolverine from the old Fox universe to the Marvel Cinematic Universe prior to his death in Logan? Or is this a completely new X universe in which Wolverine dresses differently? Either way, it would make sense for us to meet a few familiar faces along the way. Marvel needs a mechanism to introduce the X-Men, while also explaining why we’ve heard so little about mutants in the MCU so far, anda combination of the odd import from another universe plus stirrings of the mutant gene in the main reality might just do the trick. Could this explain the second, younger Wolverine?
Again, we’ll probably have to wait until 2024 to find out. Might Swift turn out to be one of the younger, newer X-Men in the main Marvel universe? It seems unlikely, but then nobody expected Harry Styles to portray a character who’s basically a superhero take on Herbert the Pervert (at least in the comics), either.
