2024 has a bold slate of 7 comic book movies but the only one with hope is expected to disappoint the most

It’s a dark time for comic book movie nerds. Our meteoric rise from the insides of lockers to a place as keepers of the dominant form of pop culture on Earth was tremendous while it lasted. Now look at us. The Flash is still picking the gravel out of its teeth after a disastrous theatrical run. Blue Beetle is expected to owe you money if you go to see it in cinemas. Secret Invasion ended up being the indignity of all indignities. Based on social media reactions, many of us may never recover from its finale.

But that isn’t stopping Marvel Studios, Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros. from stuffing seven comic book adaptations into 2024 — Madame Web, Venom 3, Captain America: Brave New World, Deadpool 3, Kraven the Hunter, Joker 2, and Thunderbolts.

Despite an overcrowded release slate for 2024, with its Thunderbolts, Venom 3, and the apparently very real possibility that it wasn’t a practical joke and Sony really is making a Madame Web movie, there remained one glimmer of potential — Deadpool 3. Or there did. Things aren’t looking great.

Deadpool 3 has been grabbing its target audience by the jowls ever since Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman announced the latter’s return as Wolverine and his official MCU debut in a viral video that had all the hallmarks of not having been run by Kevin Feige ahead of time. It represented so much more than the resurgence of Wolverine, America’s favorite children’s cartoon character that stabs people three-to-six times at a go.

It meant a return to a simpler time – specifically from 2016 to 2018 when fans were regularly gobsmacked by Hollywood’s most direct adaptations of comic books on record. Regular updates promising more and more legacy characters kept fans’ appetites good and whetted. Nothing could go wrong.

Then things started to go awry. First, the WGA strike brought the news that Reynolds and his co-stars would be unable to riff and ad-lib off-script without crossing the picket line. Then came the actors’ strike, and the news that the stars could no longer remain on-script either without crossing the picket line. It was a bad time, but then again, so was opening a residual check from a streaming service for the last decade. Solidarity gets stuff done.

All of this is making things very hard for Deadpool.

The way that fans of the Merc with a Mouth see it, things could go one of two ways, and neither one is pretty. Marvel could delay the release date of Deadpool 3. That’d mean adding as much as another year to the development time of a franchise that saw its last entry hit theaters half a decade ago. Not ideal. Potentially disastrous and momentum-killing. Somehow, not the worst option.

Behind door number two is the potential for Deadpool 3 to get rushed through the rest of its production, hitting screens as a half-finished mess like the narrative equivalent to those shots from CATS where you could see Judi Dench’s hands. As pressure mounts for movie studios, it’s not inconceivable that they’d gamble on audience enthusiasm for fan service carrying them through the release of an unwatchable movie. See also: The Flash.

It doesn’t bode well for Team Deadpool and Wolverine that the last few Disney projects — including Marvel shows and films — have been stellar disappointments.

Then again, maybe everything will be okay. Hugh Jackman is probably stoked to keep up that Wolverine physique for as long as it takes by spending six hours a day in the gym well into his 50s, right?