They’ve been kicking legacy butt, taking legacy names, recruiting legacy faces, and doing it all with a crimson smirk and animalistic snarl since the end of the July. And now, they’re getting ready to spill the guts of the streaming charts.
Marvel Studios will officially be setting Deadpool & Wolverine loose upon Disney Plus on Nov. 12, exactly two weeks from the time of writing.
It’s sure to draw a beefy home audience, even if it’s hardly in need of any additional success; the film claimed a whopping $1.337 billion at the box office against a $200 million budget, and, somehow, garnered a commendable critical reception with a 78 critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In this way, it may have completed its prophesized task of saving the Marvel Cinematic Universe from a financial standpoint, in no small part to its insistence on using a sledgehammer to drive home its wealth of fan service. And yet, Deadpool & Wolverine did absolutely squat to inspire hope in the future of this franchise. If anything, it soiled things further.
Let’s get a few things straight. Right from the get-go, Deadpool & Wolverine made no secret of the fact that it wasn’t going to be operating on any level of meaningful pathos, and at once announced its intentions to be the cameofest to end all cameofests, with a touch of nad-kicking in the direction of both Disney and Fox.
Deadpool & Wolverine was completely entitled to this mission statement, and with sole respect to the parameters it set for itself, it succeeded immaculately. The problem is that those parameters are exhausting.
We saw it in the She-Hulk: Attorney at Law finale first, but Marvel seems to be indulging in the dark art of acknowledging how lackluster so many of their creative decisions are, and retroactively (and arguably proactively) laughing at themselves in an attempt to get in on the “Marvel sucks” joke-but-also-not-a-joke. Deadpool & Wolverine does this constantly, with digs at both Fox and Disney abound.
This approach is derived from the schoolboy-level notion that you can absolve yourself of creative responsibility if you’re aware that the decisions you’re making are tacky ones. You cannot; all you do is out yourself as lazy at best and unjustifiably cynical at worst.
And really, that’s the big problem with Deadpool & Wolverine. Even if the presence of Gambit, Blade, and X-23 ultimately do nothing more than stimulate the fan service node in the minds of audiences, there’s nothing actually counterproductive to including all of these characters in the film; Deadpool & Wolverine was more than capable of telling a genuinely great story centered on the joy and wonder inherent to the superhero genre and how we can maybe repair the world at large’s relationship to it. Instead, it settled for minimum-mileage meta gags with a sprinkle of genuity here and there, none of which presented as anything other than thoroughly underbaked.
At the end of the day, Marvel has been struggling on account of a severe lack of self-respect more than anything, and given that James Gunn’s incoming DC Universe seems to be operating from an abundance of that, it’s a problem they’d be wise to sort out sooner rather than later, lest a giant, Superman-sized hole gets left in The Fantastic Four: First Steps‘ box office dreams.
