Why 'Deadpool & Wolverine' Made Me A Marvel Hater Once Again

#282: "Deadpool & Wolverine" and updating my thoughts on Marvel

Edition 282:

Hey movie lovers!

This week: Marvel reclaims its spot at the center of culture, and reminds me of all the reasons I’ve held a grudge against the spandex crusaders. No streaming recs this week, because the write-up runs really long. Hope you get a chance to read it. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a global phenomenon returns under very different circumstances.

Deadpool & Wolverine

It’s no exaggeration to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was one of the main reasons why I started this newsletter. The franchise, with it’s 25+ installments, has dominated the movie landscape pretty much nonstop since 2008, a period in which theatrical moviegoing across the country also plummeted (I won’t go so far as to say those two facts are related…but…I am grouping them in the same sentence).

If the average person is now only going to theaters something like 2-4 times per year, and for many people those movies were always MCU or other huge franchise fare, I worried they would lose perspective on what a movie could really be.

Deadpool & Wolverine is kind of the logical endpoint of that argument, a two-hour franchise management exercise that is so soul-crushingly removed from what one might consider a movie (under any artistic definition that I can only return to Martin Scorcese’s famous critique that Marvel movies are “not cinema.”

“Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”

— Martin Scorcese

Ohhhh boy, here I go again. I’m not sure why I feel compelled to come in once a year from the bullpen like Edwin Diaz to tear Marvel a new one. (For the uninitiated, when Spider-Man: No Way Home was tearing up the box office in 2021 I wrote a post entitled, “What I Hate Marvel.” That went over really well.)

The fact of the matter is that these movies stopped being for me a very long time ago, and other people….most people, LOVE them. For the past few years as people grew disillusioned with Marvel’s assembly line of mediocre Disney+ shows and multiversal mess, I thought maybe the mass psycosis had been broken. But this movie and its $211 million domestic box office opening ($441M worldwide!), prove that people are just as willing to care about the gleep glop from glurp gloop as ever before.

Why I "Hate" Marvel: 'Spider-Man: No Way Home'

If there’s one thing I’m (begrudgingly) impressed by, it’s just how much buy-in Marvel now asks for and receives from its audiences. In order to fully enjoy Deadpool & Wolverine, a viewer had to know characters, significant events and inside jokes from the previous Deadpool movies, the 25+ MCU movies, the half-dozen Marvel Disney+ shows and the previous X-Men movies, PLUS fan theories, reddit posts, movie projects that got scrapped in development, the names and jobs of Disney executives, and celebrity gossip about the actors playing the roles.

It may be hard for someone who is deep into the Marvel storytelling (read: brainwashing) to see just how far down the rabbit hole the franchise has gone, but for normies like me it can feel at times like the movie has been translated into a different language I don’t understand.

To compensate for this, it drops in a crazy amount of expository dialogue. One character, played by Matthew Macfadyen (of “Succession” and Pride and Prejudice fame) has the unenviable task of trying to be entertaining while dumping pages of explanation on the audience about multiverse timelines, the Time Variance Authority, Earth-616 vs Earth-10005, a “time ripper,” “the Void,” and matter vs anti-matter (like I said, another language).

Of course, all of that is made up crap that’s pretty inconsequential to what the movie really is, which is an on-screen corporate merger (integrating the previous Fox characters into Marvel after Disney’s acquisition) strung together by a Ryan Reynolds’ joke machine. And somehow, it works.

Apparently the one thing that can unite all American moviegoers is potty humor.

To that end, this is Marvel’s first R-rated movie, a rating it certainly earns based on the amount of dirty jokes, blood and violence. But at the same time, all of that is presented cartoonishly and in a good-natured way. There’s nothing particularly grave or hard to reckon with — for instance, no one would say that Oppenheimer is somehow more suitable for kids because it has less profanity and violence, because it feels much more adult.

Even though Disney would never admit to marketing to kids, I think it’s pretty telling that one research firm estimated 11% of opening weekend audiences in the U.S. were under the age of 17 — compared to less that 5% for the average R-rated movie.

That means an adult had to buy a ticket to go with the kid (cha-ching, another sale), and the movie was smart to appeal to a generation that might’ve been kids when the MCU started in 2008 but now are full-blown adults. There are specific moments (no spoilers!) that appeal directly to 30-somethings who were going to movies 20 years ago.

The same problem plagues this movie as all the others, my eternal soap box: zero stakes. How can anyone get excited about Deadpool and Wolverine fighting each other when both have regenerative powers that heal them instantaneously? Or when they fight an entire pack of Deadpool multiverse variants (I’m nauseous just writing that) who all heal, what’s the point? It’s no surprise that the climax of this movie is a literal perfect example of what we in this newsletter call, “The Chewbacca Problem.” To a tee.

All is forgiven because of the comedy, but Reynolds’ shtick as Deadpool — insert inappropriate reference into every sentence and suck up all the oxygen from every other person in the scene — never really worked for me, even moreso now as a 47-year-old man who has become arguably the most important figure in the MCU rather than the guy on the outside taking the piss out of the Disney try-hards.

Now Deadpool is a try-hard himself, tacking on an obligatory hero narrative arc that the movie itself doesn’t even believe in. A viewer had better have a rollicking good time, because from a plot perspective, Marvel remains absolutely terrified to advance its plot one iota past the events of Endgame (by my count that’s now 11 movies since 2019 that have basically gone round and round and come back to where they started, like…dare I say it…a theme park ride??).

The only thing that worked for me (again, this may say more about me than the movie) was Hugh Jackman. Holy moly is that guy a good actor, even within the confines of this literal clown show. I’m not sure how he’s able to summon real emotional gravitas in an environment that openly mocks anyone taking anything seriously, but he made me care deeply about his character even while spending most of the movie in the background scowling.

Even with Jackman, it’s impossible not to be cynical. His character’s send-off in Logan was perfect, and that movie is ACTUALLY great, and there’s not a single reason to ruin his legacy by reversing one of the few consequential deaths in superhero history other than….well duh, money. No part of me thinks this was his last turn as Wolverine.

But I’m not surprised. Another of the actual emotional superhero send-offs was undone this week when Marvel threw what I can only imagine is a Walter White-sized pile of cash at Robert Downey Jr. to return to the MCU and fix their big villain problem.

And so we’ve returned to the root cause of why I hold a grudge against Marvel. Making a “good movie” is not their top priority. It may not even be top five, behind “make a lot of money,” “rehab the brand image,” “service the hardcore fans,” “introduce the movies to come,” and “make an R-rated movie without offending anyone.”

I hope you enjoyed the movie, don’t let me take that from you! But please please click around to my other Friday newsletters and use me as a resource to find counter-programming that can hopefully remind you of how fulfilling, challenging, and even mind-blowing “actual” movies can be.

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Trailer Watch: Squid Game 2

I think this is the perfect “Trailer Watch” to pair with my MCU discussion, because “Squid Game” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk envisioned this original concept as a movie, before pivoting it into a limited series when that’s what the market was buying. It was a global phenomenon, so Netflix came beating down his door to make more.

But this trailer date announcement tells me a lot. First, that the “season two” is called “Squid Game 2,” like a movie, and its release date is December 26, 2024. That’s three and a half years since the first season came out. And the trailer also says definitively that the “third and final season” comes out in 2025 — which means they filmed both simultaneously, and are telling a contained story. All those signs point toward quality being the top priority, so I have a high degree of confidence that these follow-ups are going to be good.