Deadpool & Wolverine Pulled An Old X-Men Movie Trick & Nobody Noticed!

Deadpool & Wolverine is 2024’s biggest superhero movie hit, but despite earning rave reviews and over $1 billion worldwide, its most sly trick is one that the X-Men franchise has pulled off before. In Deadpool & Wolverine, The Merc With a Mouth joins forces with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to save his universe from annihilation. Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson and Jackman’s Wolverine also acquire some much-needed help from other Marvel characters pulled into a realm known as The Void, including Logan’s “daughter” Laura a.k.a. X-23 (Dafne Keen). While Keen’s return to her breakout role has been just as heralded as her original portrayal of X-23 in 2017’s Logan, Deadpool & Wolverine also make one huge change to Laura that has surprisingly flown completely under the radar.

X-23 Doesn’t Have A Mexican Accent Anymore In Deadpool & Wolverine

When Dafne Keen’s Laura a.k.a. X-23 arrives on screen in Deadpool & Wolverine, she quickly becomes a recruit to the titular duos mission to stop Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) and save Deadpool’s home universe, with the help of numerous other displaced Marvel heroes from other corners of the multiverse. While Keen’s Laura has grown into an adult since her last appearance in 2017’s Logan, an arguably bigger but much more subtle change has taken place between movies – specifically, that Laura now speaks with a standard American or Canadian accent, compared to the Mexican accent she spoke with as a child in Logan.

Of course, with Deadpool & Wolverine being a multiverse movie, it could be easy to attribute Laura’s accent change to her simply being the X-23 of another universe, as opposed to the young Laura seen in Logan. Indeed, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is exactly that in Deadpool & Wolverine, with Jackman also appearing as numerous other Wolverine variants in the movie (along with Henry Cavill dropping in as “The Cavillrine”, as well.) However, while the movie itself doesn’t confirm Laura’s origins definitively, her late-night campfire conversation with Wolverine all but outright states that she is indeed the Laura from Logan with the statements she makes alluding to their prior relationship in the film. Moreover, Dafne Keen herself has also outright confirmed that Deadpool & Wolverine’s X-23 is in fact the same one seen in Logan (via ComicBookMovie.com).

While Keen also revealed that director Shawn Levy explained that Laura lost her Mexican accent due to living in America for several years, that is never stated within the movie itself. However, swapping one accent for another actually has precedent in the X-Men franchise. Case in point – Halle Berry’s Storm.

Halle Berry’s Storm Also Dropped Her African Accent After One Movie

Halle Berry’s Storm is well-known for being one of the pillars of the Fox X-Men movies, but her portrayal of Ororo Munro has one big continuity gaffe of its own in the rather sudden shift of her accent in the first two movies. In 2000’s X-Men, Berry’s Storm speaks with an African accent, owing to Storm’s canonical Kenyan lineage in the comics. By 2003’s X2: X-Men United, Storm’s African accent has completely vanished with Berry speaking with her normal American accent throughout the film and the rest of her tenure as Storm.

While Berry’s accent shift has a drawn a fair amount of attention over the years, the X-Men movies themselves have made no effort to comment on it, with no official reason ever been given for Berry shifting to her normal accent from X2 onward. To be fair, Berry’s Storm is somewhat soft-spoken in the original X-Men and her accent is relatively subtle, which could have led to the decision for Berry to speak in her normal voice in X2 with the understanding that the change wouldn’t be all that hard for the audience to accept. At the same time, Storm’s accent change was also arguably the first domino in the X-Men franchise’s extremely casual attitude on continuity.

The X-Men Franchise Has Never Cared Much About Continuity

While the first three X-Men movies do make an effort to maintain some level continuity (save for Storm’s sudden accent change), the series really started loosening its concern for continuity around the time of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which introduces numerous timeline issues and scenes like Wolverine’s escape from Weapon X that don’t match up with what came before. X-Men: First Class caused its own continuity rupture with the timeline of Professor X meeting Magneto along with Xavier’s paralysis that diverged from what X-Men established, and while X-Men: Days of Future Past made strides to clear some of this up, it also created continuity gaps of its own.

By the time of Deadpool, the X-Men franchise simply threw up its hands and gave up trying to adhere to any kind of strict continuity, as exemplified in Wade’s line “McAvoy or Stewart? These timelines are so confusing!” With the X-Men franchise’s continuity getting even murkier with Logan and The New Mutants, Deadpool & Wolverine is something of an anomaly in trying to maintain any kind of continuity with Logan at all. Still, Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t terribly concerned about continuity itself, which definitely helps account for X-23 speaking with a new accent as suddenly and without explanation as Storm did.

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Did you notice that X-23 no longer has a Mexican accent in Deadpool & Wolverine?