In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark drops from the sky and saves a little boy who is about to be obliterated by one of Whiplash and Justin Hammer's drones.
When Spider-Man joined the MCU in 2016's Captain America: Civil War (and quickly became Iron Man's protege), fans soon started theorising that the kid could have been a young Peter Parker. It was a fun idea and one which filmmaker Jon Watts first brought up while promoting Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017.
"I was watching all these other movies and being like, 'What if that little kid at the Stark Expo was Peter Parker? In the Iron Man mask,'" he said at the time. "Like, he'd be about the right age for that. And he loves Tony Stark. [Because] it's not completely figured out, that you can just go back and basically write fan fiction for those movies, then the fan fiction becomes reality."
Two years later, Tom Holland was hyping up Spider-Man: Far From Home and claimed that Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige had "confirmed" Peter was meant to be the boy saved by Iron Man.
"Spider-Man is actually in a previous Marvel movie. My version of Spider-Man. Do you know where it is?" he asked. "My Peter Parker is in 'Iron Man 2', but at the end when all the robots are attacking all the people, and the little kid's wearing an Iron Man mask, and the bad robot recognizes the Iron Man mask as a threat, and the kid puts his hand up."
"Then Tony Stark lands next to him and blows him away and goes 'Good job kid!' and flies away. That's the theory... No, it was actually me, it was me. Kevin Feige confirmed it."
Despite comments like these, Spidey's Iron Man 2 cameo has never really been considered "official." Well, that all changes in Deadpool & Wolverine.
During the movie's opening, Wade Wilson uses Cable's time travel device to visit the Sacred Timeline in 2018 and meets with Happy Hogan in Tony's office to request Avengers membership.
There are lots of Easter Eggs in there - Agent Coulson's Captain America trading cards from The Avengers, for example - but we spotted that little boy's helmet alongside the photo of Tony and Peter taken in Stark Industries (the latter is obscured, presumably because of Marvel Studios' complicated partnership with Sony Pictures).
We can't think of any other reason for Tony to have that helmet alongside the picture of him and Peter if it didn't have a deeper morning. As a result, it's now safe to assume that this retconned Iron Man 2 Easter Egg has just been made official MCU canon!
Deadpool & Wolverine is now playing in theaters.