The second trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine has arrived and is filled with many surprises. One of the most exciting reveals is Lady Deathstrike’s apparent presence in the movie.
Deadpool & Wolverine, the third movie in the Deadpool film series, sees Deadpool/Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) and Wolverine/Logan (Hugh Jackman) enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time. Wilson’s time dalliances in Deadpool 2 lead the Time Variance Authority (TVA) to the Merc With a Mouth. As the latest trailer reveals, Wilson recruits a variant of Logan to help him save the MCU. The Logan variant is a washed-up, jaded version of the mutant who seemingly failed to save his own universe from destruction. The trailer also gives viewers a glimpse of Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova.
One of the most interesting aspects of the new Deadpool & Wolverine trailer is that Nova’s villainous base is built out of Ant-Man’s enormous corpse. Meanwhile, eagle-eyed viewers are convinced they saw a few Marvel villains walking around the base, including Lady Deathstrike.
Is Lady Deathstrike in Deadpool & Wolverine?
Prior to the trailer, there was no mention of Lady Deathstrike’s appearance. However, if one pauses the trailer at about 1:52, standing at the base of Ant-Man’s helmet near the stairs is a woman in a dark suit with her dark hair tied back. The giveaway that this is Lady Deathstrike is that she has adamantium claws extending from her fingertips.
Social media users have already zoomed in on the figure and uploaded the screenshot, and the claws are unmistakable.
Lady Deathstrike has already appeared on the big screen before. In X2, she is portrayed by Kelly Hu. Hence, it’s believed Hu may be reprising her role for Deadpool & Wolverine.
Who is Lady Deathstrike?
In X2, Yuriko Oyama (a.k.a. Lady Deathstrike) is a mutant who was experimented on, including having adamantium bound to her extendable claws. After the experimentation, William Stryker (Brian Cox) used his Mind Control Serum to make Lady Deathstrike serve as his assistant. Throughout the movie, she fights the X-Men and even manages to hold her own in a fight with Wolverine due to her adamantium claws and a healing factor as strong as his. Unfortunately, viewers hardly get to know who Lady Deathstrike really is, as she’s under Stryker’s control for almost the entire movie before being killed by having adamantium injected into her.
However, given that the timeline later changed in X-Men: Days of Future Past, it’s possible that Lady Deathstrike was never experimented on or killed by Wolverine in the new timeline, making it possible for either her or one of her variants to appear in Deadpool & Wolverine. Perhaps, in the new movie, she’ll more closely follow her comic book story.
Oyama has quite a tragic backstory in Marvel comics. She was born to the ruthless and unhinged Lord Dark Wind, a World War II veteran who turned to a life of crime upon returning home. He and his associate, Stryker, tortured and experimented on his children. Lord Dark Wind was the first to discover the process of binding adamantium to human bone, but his research was stolen. Eventually, Oyama had enough of her father’s evil and killed him. However, her newfound freedom came at a cost as her lover, Kira, took his own life out of loyalty to her father. The tragedy changed Oyama, leading her to seek to carry on her father’s twisted legacy.
Upon learning of Wolverine’s existence, she became convinced that he had stolen her father’s work and used it to give himself adamantium enhancements, so she gave herself the moniker Lady Deathstrike and set out to find Wolverine, beginning what would become a long-held obsession with the mutant. In her desperation to defeat Wolverine, she eventually sought out Spiral and allowed the sorceress to transform her into a cyborg, having her skeleton reinforced with adamantium like Wolverine and being given a machine body. Even after trading her humanity, Lady Deathstrike still failed to defeat her rival.
While she continued hunting Wolverine, she also eventually became a prominent member of The Reavers, a group of criminal cyborgs who frequently fought the X-Men. Whether working privately as an assassin or with The Reavers, Lady Deathstrike has remained one of the X-Men’s most formidable foes and has earned the title of a supervillain in Marvel Comics. It’s unclear what she’s doing in Deadpool & Wolverine, if that really is her in the trailer, but it almost certainly means trouble for Logan and Wade.
(featured image: 20th Century Fox)
