What is a movie? It might sound like a stupid question, but it’s one that’s been echoing in my head since I left school. Deadpool and Wolverine Last Friday. Marvel’s cameo-filled, fourth-wall-breaking superhero sequel grossed a staggering $438.3 million in its opening weekend — a record for an R-rated movie. In many ways, it feels like a watershed moment. But it’s not a good one. If, as some critics have suggested, we’re watching the death of cinema unfold before our eyes, then this has taken the form of a public execution.
There are worse movies than this. Deadpool and WolverineEven within the scope of Marvel’s own bandwidth-driven work, last year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum Madness and 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder were much more complex works – structurally chaotic and aesthetically so disgusting that Deadpool and Wolverine not. But Deadpool feels like the most cynical, spiritually and creatively devoid of any canon to date. A movie about absolutely nothing — a movie with no discernible purpose or artistic ambition beyond the perpetuation of its own institutional mythos.
There are jokes about the Disney-Fox merger. Jokes about producer Kevin Feige. Jokes about the widespread disillusionment with the Marvel franchise. About halfway through the movie, the two unnamed leads (played by Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, the latter of whom—at one point—literally reprises his iconic X-Men character) encounter a group of former superheroes: Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Wesley Snipes’ Blade, Chris Evans’ Johnny Storm ( Fantastic Four), Channing Tatum’s Gambit (never produced) and Dafne Keen’s mini Wolverine Logan.
The film invites us to marvel at these flashbacks. The meta-referential dialogue suggests that these characters, seemingly stuck in some kind of extra-universe “void,” are just they get the endings they deserveWhat these “earned endings” actually look like in practice is that each one consists of less than 10 lines of dialogue – in Snipes’ case, it mostly consists of repeating catchphrases from the first three films Knife Edge movies – all before getting into a firefight in the desert and getting swallowed by some kind of deadly CGI aerial monster. There’s no attempt at characterization, no purpose behind the meta-jokes. It’s amazing how audiences insist on salivating for some reason to see Reynolds’ Deadpool exchange one line of tasteless banter with Tatum’s Gambit. Audiences didn’t like Knife Edge because Snipes just showed up, stood there, and shouted slogans — he was part of a story, he had the right character, the stakes, the intentionality. It’s absolutely damning that Marvel can’t see the difference — or, worse yet, if they can see the difference but choose to ignore it.
It’s also significant that Reynolds spent most of his time here. Deadpool and Wolverine press tour performatively spews in an uncertain direction Green LanternThe critically panned 2011 DC Comics blockbuster would certainly be reclaimed as a “forgotten gem” along with other surprises if it were owned by Marvel and not DC.
To be clear, Deadpool and Wolverine is not the first film of its kind. In many ways, it reapplies the lessons of 2021. Spider-Man: No Way Home – A film that made waves (and made over $2 billion) with surprise cameos that gave Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and more the chance to reprise their roles as Spider-Man from the past. But even that film offered more in terms of story and purpose Deadpool and Wolverine. Garfield, Maguire, and their friends were given the most basic outlines of character development to play out as they saw fit. (Garfield ultimately made much better use of this opportunity.)
If you don’t mind, let me wax a little philosophical: How do we define what a movie is and isn’t? Marvel has reshaped Hollywood in its own image over the last two decades, diminishing some of what makes filmmaking unique as an art form and shifting it toward something more television-based and serialized. Deadpool and Wolverine It’s a movie because it’s being released in theaters and it’s two hours long, but other than those technicalities, it has almost nothing in common with a traditional blockbuster when it comes to intent. The problem isn’t that it tells its story badly – it has no interest in telling it well. It’s simply concerned with the maintenance and consolidation of the Marvel brand, its viability as both product and advertising, a snake eating its own tail.
“Turn off your brain and enjoy it for what it is” has become the prevailing mantra of our time. Deadpool advocates on social media. And of course, people are allowed to enjoy whatever they want. But while freebasing cocaine is certainly enjoyable for many people, that doesn’t mean we should all participate in its production and distribution. If cinema starts to lose sight of the idea that it should function as a work of art — if it’s just a bad artbut something new and insidious – then the game is, as it were, really over. If Deadpool and Wolverine This is what the future of cinema looks like, it’s going to take more than a few brave heroes to save it.
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is now in theaters