'Deadpool & Wolverine' and the current state of the MCU
We take a break from girl culture to check in on some boy culture (spoiler free!)
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When I’m not digging into the unsung corners of “girl culture,” I’m devoting myself with equal fervor to the superhero phenomenon that’s taken over pop culture on-and-off for the past 24 years. So, if you’ll forgive the total swerve from my usual focus here, I’d like to share my spoiler-free thoughts on Deadpool & Wolverine—perhaps the most “boy culture” coded movie… ever?
Superheroes, of course, have never just been “for boys.” As a kid, I fell in love with the ’90s X-Men cartoon specifically because it featured so many cool female characters. (Jean Grey forever!) And I carried that love right on into the early 2000s live-action films, where so much of what makes Hugh Jackman’s performance as Wolverine work is how his overt tough guy demeanor sits alongside his quiet respect for women. (It’s the same secret sauce Jon Bernthal tapped into as The Punisher.) But there was a decided vibe shift in the mid-2010s, as the double header of Deadpool and Logan pushed the mutant-verse into grittier, gorier, more puerile places.
The good news is that if you liked Logan and the last two Deadpool movies, you’ll almost certainly love Deadpool & Wolverine, which takes the R-rated violence and Teen-rated humor to new extremes. This may be Deadpool’s first official foray into the MCU, but there’s no attempt to reshape him into an aspirational PG-13 hero (even if the character is now appearing at Disneyland). The brutal violence, foul-mouthed humor, and meta fourth wall breaks remain intact—perhaps even amped up as Disney tries to prove it can hang with the cool kids.
Personally, however, I’ve always found Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool shtick more exhausting than charming, and I much prefer the pulpy gravitas of 2013’s The Wolverine to the brooding cynicism of Logan. So I went into Deadpool & Wolverine less excited about its central team-up than curious about what this film—Marvel’s only theatrical release in all of 2024—would say about the current state of the MCU. And while Deadpool & Wolverine quite literally spends a good chunk of its runtime discussing just that (“Welcome to the MCU. You're joining at a bit of a low point,” Deadpool quips), I came away feeling like Marvel is more delaying the inevitable than truly righting the ship. Especially because She-Hulk already made half of these meta jokes two years ago and nothing has changed.
Mostly it seems like Marvel looked at its post-Endgame output, realized that Spider-Man: No Way Home is the only movie that’s had any kind of actual cultural impact, and decided Deadpool & Wolverine should just shamelessly rip off that format again. Where No Way Home served as a love letter to the pre-MCU Sony Spider-Man films, Deadpool & Wolverine is a more tongue-in-cheek homage to the uneven superhero output of 20th Century Fox—one filled with all sorts of unexpected cameos and nostalgic surprises designed to rile up a packed audience of superhero obsessives.
And, look, I’m deep enough into all this superhero shit that it is fun for me when Charlie Cox pops up in No Way Home or some of Loki’s worldbuilding gets folded into the big screen MCU. Deadpool & Wolverine has plenty of genuinely exciting surprises up its comics-accurate sleeves, and, to its credit, the cameos here work far better than Marvel’s previous attempts to capitalize on Fox-era X-Men nostalgia in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Marvels. But with a visual style that trades bloody kineticism for weightless CGI and a plot that exists almost exclusively as a cameo-delivery system, Deadpool & Wolverine is more of an experience (some might even say a gimmick) than an actual cohesive film.
In fact, I can’t fathom what I could possibly get out of watching Deadpool & Wolverine for a second time when the biggest thing it has going for it is its sense of surprise and subversion. Even on a first viewing, I found my mind drifting to other, better superhero movies—like the quiet kitchen scene in X2 where Bobby Drake helps Logan cool off a soda bottle with his ice powers. It’s not a major plot moment and it doesn’t up the film’s action quota, but it’s clever and it rounds out the world and makes the characters and their lives more three-dimensional. Sadly, it’s almost impossible to imagine a scene that observational or that physically tactile existing in the MCU anymore—certainly not in Deadpool & Wolverine, which somehow feels more video game-y than director Shawn Levy’s previous Ryan Reynolds collaboration, Free Guy, which literally took place inside a video game.
And, look, maybe it’s unfair to critique such a goofily meta movie for being goofy and meta. But for all its self-aware jokes, Deadpool & Wolverine feels less like its satirizing the MCU than giving in to the very same foibles that have dragged down the studio for the past five years. Once upon a time, these films found success by putting likable characters in straightforward stories with just a handful of interconnected Easter Eggs sprinkled in. Now Marvel is so obsessed with evoking nostalgia for the past or laying groundwork for the future that its movies and TV shows seldom simply exist in the present anymore.
While Deadpool & Wolverine talks a big game about resetting the MCU, it largely delivers more of the same. It’s No Way Home meets Loki meets Multiverse of Madness meets DC’s recent Flash movie (none of which can hold a candle to Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse anyway). And I’m just not sure how many times Marvel can keep going back to this multiversal well where no one ever really dies and nothing is ever actually over.
Though the MCU has never served up the cinematic equivalent of fine dining, its films at least used to be hearty fast-food fare. Deadpool & Wolverine feels more like eating a bag of Sour Patch Kids and calling it dinner. While the sugar rush may keep you going for a bit, the crash is inevitable.
Ugh. Me not understand how bunch of toxic people manage to seek out a substack just to leave shitty comments.
Anyway, me sure this will be big hit solely on "remember this guy?!?" factor, but as someone who A) is a boy, and B) stayed with MCU as recently as Marvels, me have zero interest in this one. Smirking deconstruction was clever in 90s and got old pretty quickly. Me will take movie like Casino Royale — that takes fully-deconstructed character and than reassembles it into better version — than movie that trying to spoof thing while also being that thing.
Very nice article, thanks for writing insightful things about this movie that I will probably never watch. I am always puzzled by people who can't fathom that one actually thinks about these movies... So I join Cookie Monster in their astonishment. I wich you could remove the haters' comments, though your answers so some of them are pretty priceless 😁