In the Marvel Comics Universe anything less than a billion dollars at the box office is considered a disappointment. The firm’s record is held by Avengers: Endgame (2019) which made a staggering US$2,797,501,328 (AUD $4,267,311,612), placing it a narrow second to James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) on the all-time top earners list. It must have been devastating when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (2023) garnered a paltry US$845 million. One wonders how they could live with the embarrassment.
The tremors were a little more serious with The Marvels (2023). Although it earned US$199 million, the break-even point was allegedly US$439 million. Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) was also a bit of a dud, making US$463 million, which left it US$136 million short of a break-even. All told, 2023 was a poor year for the MCU. To put that into perspective, the top grossing Australian film for 2023 was the documentary, John Farnham: Finding the Voice, which made AUD$4,496,883. This means that Marvel’s biggest flop earned roughly 68 times more than our biggest success. It is, indeed, a different universe.
When one is accustomed to stratospheric returns a dip in revenue is no laughing matter. And so we have Deadpool & Wolverine, a movie in which the title says it all. No tricksy words such “Quantumania”, no untested stars, as in The Marvels. Finally, if one wanted to be brutally honest (and this is not the case with Marvel), no stories in which the lead characters are female or ethnically diverse. There’s a limit to inclusiveness when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
In one of his notebooks, Wittgenstein writes: “Fortnum & Mason’s. I can imagine some people believing these words belong together.” The MCU executives obviously had the same feeling about the words: Deadpool & Wolverine. “Hey, let’s make a movie with two of our most popular characters, who just happen to be old white guys.” No risks, two certified stars in Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.
The versatile Shawn Levy is signed as director. Ryan Reynolds hooks up with two experienced scriptwriters, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, to work on a screenplay. The usual formulas are locked in place, along with an extra helping of bloody violence and a line of banter that verges on camp. From the moment Deadpool tries to lure a drunken Wolverine out of a bar, and is told: “Lady, I’m not interested,” the gay jokes kick in. For the rest of the film our heroes will alternate between coy flirtation and beating each other to a pulp. It’s a particularly brutal form of co-dependent relationship.
When Deadpool goes all gooey at the sight of a scraggy little dog, we’re expected to laugh at his effeminacy as we might once have laughed at Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served? Yes, that’s how sophisticated this humour is! “Are you free, Wolverine?” The main difference is that Mr. Humphries never managed to slaughter a few dozen people every ten minutes. In the opening sequence we are treated to a gory massacre with light-hearted necrophilia, accompanied by Deadpool’s trademark motormouth wisecracking.
Perhaps the chief distinction of this film, which is being billed as an “action-comedy”, is its unique ability to combine abject campery with more blood-letting than I’ve ever seen in a superhero movie. It’s other claim to fame may be its extreme self-consciousness. We never get through a scene without a reference to Fox Studios, which made the first two Deadpool films and a swathe of X-Men flicks, before being acquired by Disney in 2019.
Even the plot is tailored around this corporate ragging, as Deadpool’s alter-ego, Wade Wilson, goes to see the Marvel corporation to apply for a gig with the Avengers. When he’s rejected he returns to the everyday world, where he works as a car salesman. He’s in the midst of a surprise birthday party sprung by a motley group of friends when he’s summoned – or rather abducted – by a group called the Time Variance Authority (TVA) and offered the Marvel role he craves, but the pay-off is that this particular universe, and all Deadpool’s friends, will be obliterated.
This is all down to a bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur, named Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) who has gone rogue. The TVA is apparently in charge of regulating the countless alternative worlds we know as the Metaverse. To save his own version of earth, Deadpool goes searching through these worlds to find Wolverine, whom Paradox has identifed as a crucial “anchor being”, whatever that means. This allows for some predictable comedy, as he encounters a series of absurd variations, until he finds the very “worst” Wolverine, sinking into deep depression with bottle of Scotch.
After trying to slice each other to bits a couple of times, the duo make their way to a world called “the Void”, where they battle a group of ugly mugs who have borrowed heavily from the Mad Max films. The ruler of this place is one Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the evil twin sister of X-men guru, Charles Xavier. Like her brother, she favours the Yul Brynner look, but there the resemblance ends. Cassandra, as you’ve probably guessed, is a bad egg (head).
Somehow Deadpool and Wolverine escape her clutches and find themselves shacked up with a renegade group of superheroes that includes Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Wesley Snipes’s Blade, and Channing Tatum as Gambit – a character lined up to star in a movie that was never made. Judging by Tatum’s ridiculous outfit, his incomprehensible “French” accent and the sense of incipient embarrassment that accompanies his every move, it’s not hard to understand why the project was shelved. I had my doubts about his performance in Fly Me to the Moon, but that seems positively Shakespearean alongside Gambit.
I digress, but this whole film is like one big digression, chasing its own tail, eventually bringing us back to the Earth we know, for the obligatory stunning climax. There’s a lot of action, buckets of blood, repeated digs at Fox Studios, endless blather from Deadpool, who breaks the fourth wall whenever he feels like it, and much bamboozling indulgence in the Metaverse – a concept Marvel has flogged to death in movie after movie.
The chief appeal of the Metaverse seems to be that you can kill off a character in one world and find another version in the next, as Deadpool does with Wolverine. It also allows the gag of showing multiple versions of the same character, as in the Spider Man movies. In this film it’s Deadpool who gets the treatment, from a ‘woke’, hippy character called Nicepool, to another 50 variations that turn up, uninvited, on the streets of New York City.
Even while this Metaverse schlock is unfolding, Deadpool is making a joke of it, suggesting Marvel has overdone it, and the device has had its day. Anticipating critical comment, the scriptwriters are seeking to defuse it in advance.
The final piece of MCU machinery is a barrage of early “reviews” raving about how this is the greatest Marvel movie yet, praising the chemistry between Reynolds and Jackman, finding the action to be breathtaking, the humour simply hilarious, and on and on. They’ve understood this is a supine age when criticism is viewed as “nasty”. Why spoil everybody’s fun when you can curry favour by writing a lot of gushing spin?
Best of all, it works! Deadpool & Wolverine has blitzed the box office, taking US$438 million worldwide on its first weekend. In the United States this is an all-time record for a film given a ‘R’ rating by a squeamish classifications board. In a world in which the quantity of ‘likes’ is taken as an indisputable badge of quality, this camp, bloodthirsty, incomprehensible movie may be on its way to cinematic immortality.
Deadpool & Wolverine
Directed by Shawn Levy
Written by Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Matthew Macfadyen, Emma Corrin, Rob Delaney, Morena Baccarin, Leslie Uggams, Jon Favreau, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, Chris Evans, Aaron Stanford, Dafne Keen
USA/Canada/Australia/New Zealand, MA 15+, 128 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 3 August, 2024