There is of course the Deadpool movies which file fairly accurately his comic origin and he is not a mutant.
There is of course the Deadpool movies which file fairly accurately his comic origin and he is not a mutant. Isn't deadpool a mutant in his films? The program that he entered creates mutants by stimulating their latent mutant genes as said by the "doctor", who received the same treatment as Wilson and is also called "mutant" by a random gangster, so shouldn't deadpool be considered a mutant too? ^_^
If you define mutant as only those born with mutant DNA, then Deadpool is not a mutant. Juggernaut is another example. Even those they were all appeared in x-men storyline.
Marvel over the years has kind of made a mess of this via shifting stories and retcons and the typical way comic books stories borrow just enough science to be wrong.My best understanding of the current canon is that a "mutant" in the Marvel sense of the word is someone who is born with the X-gene enabled in their DNA, which generally gets fully expressed as the person enters puberty (but sometimes is triggered by stress or other factors). Mutants aren't always born with their powers active, although the presumption is that all mutants are born mutants: they just don't have their powers developed enough to do anything until later in life.Because of this, it is difficult to know who's a mutant. If you experiment on someone and they gain superpowers, that could be because the experiments somehow conveyed those powers to them (i.e. the Hulk) or those experiments could somehow activate the X-gene in that individual (i.e Rogue). The only way to know if someone is or is not a mutant in the Marvel universe is for someone to study their genes and find out in a way the readers of the story can also know authoritatively. If no one explicitly tests somehow, there's no way to know just by knowing when and how they gained their powers.It has never been explained what the difference is between the X-gene mutation and all other genetic mutations that grant super powers. This is kept deliberately fuzzy and ambiguous by Marvel for story telling flexibility. For example, Inhuman terrigenesis and Mutant activation sound very similar, and both are canonically the result of Celestial manipulation (at least, last I checked). What makes them different? It has never been stated.