WHEN RYAN REYNOLDS and Hugh Jackman checked the numbers that the first trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine had done, what do you reckon they did? How do you celebrate posting 365 million views on YouTube in 24 hours? Exactly one high five for each view? A curt nod? A sudden swooping sensation in your stomach when you realise people are actually unbelievably jazzed for more Deadpool and it matters enormously to them whether it’s any good or not?

Whatever they did, that’s the fact of it. Deadpool & Wolverine is, by a distance, the most hotly anticipated movie of 2024. Yes, Dune 2 looks great, and Gladiator 2 is very exciting. But the fact that Deadpool 3 has the kind of barrelling hype around it even in the middle of The Great Superhero Slump (cf The MarvelsMadame Web) is a barometer of quite how much people like quips and snark when they’re coming out of the Wrexham chairman—co-chairman, sorry Rob McElhenny—and quite how intense the nostalgia for Jackman stabbing people with his claws still is.

“I never stopped [trying to get him to come back as Wolverine],” Reynolds told Variety last year. “I was just pestering him like a gnat over the last many years. I believe in timing, as much as hard work and luck and all those intersections that are supposed to meet. Timing’s the big one. I think he was ready. I think he was excited.”

The return of Jackman’s Wolverine is the headline for the third movie in the Deadpool franchise. But what else do we know about Deadpool & Wolverine?

When is Deadpool & Wolverine released?

We’ll see Deadpool & Wolverine in cinemas from 25 July, a date which was moved up a few months after being shunted around a fair bit because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood last year.

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Who is in Deadpool & Wolverine?

Reynolds, obviously, and Jackman. The pair’s aw-shucks friendship is a big reason why this team-up has been the one which Marvel fans have wanted for absolutely ages. The Wolvering gig will be slightly different to the ones Jackman has played before, apparently.

“What we pitched him was enough of a divergence from the character that he knows and the character that he’s left behind, that it gives him something completely new to play and something that he’s really excited to do,” Reynolds told Variety.

Elsewhere, Matthew Macfadyen turns up as an agent for the Time Variance Authority – remember them, Loki fans? – who recruits Deadpool to help sort some stuff out. Emma Corrin is down to play an as yet unnamed villain, and lots of regulars return: Morena Baccarin as Wade Wilson’s fiancée Vanessa, Rob Delaney as Peter from the X-Force team, Leslie Uggams as Wilson’s roommate Blind Al and Karan Soni as Dopinder. Those rumours about Taylor Swift turning up are, alas, just rumours.

Where can I watch the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer?

Right here buddy. It dropped during the Super Bowl and, as we’ve covered, went bananas.

What happens in Deadpool & Wolverine?

From the looks of it, Deadpool is getting exactly what he’s wanted for ages: a legit invitation to join the big leagues among the Avengers A-listers, having been tapped by Macfadyen’s TVA agent to straighten out some temporal malfunction or other. Whether that means that the whole film takes place within the MCU is up in the air. We might dip into it and then back out again – and certainly there needs to be some kind of answer as to how Jackman’s Wolverine is now not dead having died pretty conclusively in Logan. Stranger Things and Free Guy director Shawn Levy is behind the camera, and has confirmed that Logan is very much a part of the canon. So basically, it’ll make about as much sense as the X-Men continuity ever does.

This story originally appeared on Esquire UK.

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