A Year at the Movies, 2024: July, Deadpool and Wolverine
Or, Capeshit: Revisited
May, 2018
I am just shy of high school graduation. My friend Landon has picked me up in his mother’s minivan—I have a car, but it’s more fun to ride together. We are southbound from Centreville, Maryland to Easton, two county lines to cross; a thirty-minute embarkation. Our purpose is seeing Deadpool 2.
I have chosen to pull from my closet an ill-fitting Deadpool t-shirt. Landon’s mad about this, because he thinks it’ll mark us as the bad kind of nerd—already, in the Mid-Trump years, these distinctions are forming. We don’t want to look like we want to see Deadpool 2. That would indicate us as being the same sort of people who enjoy The Big Bang Theory, or Minecraft Youtube videos (by this point in our lives, we’ve outgrown both, but know plenty of people still enjoying them. They disgust us more than depress us). I mostly wore the shirt because I knew it would annoy him, and because I thought that his annoyance would be funny. It was.
Mid-way down the highway, a tire blows. Neither one of us knew how to fix it. Landon’s Dad drove down and rescued us, bringing a spare to change the tire and loaning us a second vehicle. My Mom, for her part, called the theater and got them to exchange the tickets for a later showing. This left us with enough time to go to Chilis before the movie. I ordered some sort of Chicken Sandwich.
Anyway, this is all a workaround to admitting I am a biased review of both any Ryan Reynolds-led Deadpool movie, and of superhero film (hereafter: capeshit) as a genre more broadly. It is an inherently adolescent form, which represents to me my own adolescence, and a person I have outgrown. That’s all to say, Deadpool 2 came for me right at the hinge point between being able to unironically love a superhero movie and being turned off from the idea of a corporate-blockbuster-megahit in general. They give me the shakes, the way that things one enjoyed as a child tend to. And further, 2018 was a brilliant market moment for capeshit, with Deadpool 2 hitting between the third Avengers movie and the first Spiderverse one. Deadpool and Wolverine encountered a different landscape, and a different me.
July 2024
So, 6 years go by. Disney merges with Fox, Ryan Reynolds undergoes another round of eternal youth blood transfusions, and I go through college and into graduate school. And finally, we have a new Deadpool.
Having already established myself as an unreliable critic (if there can be such a thing as a trustworthy one), I will now admit: I didn’t like it. 4/10. Deadpool is annoying, and Wolverine is a completely useless addition. From an artistic point of view, I’m unclear on why this movie was made, and doubly unsure who it is for. From a practical point of view, I know the answer to both; money and the fans, respectively.
I will not be taking the easy shot of dunking on superhero movie fans—after all, I go see all this crap too. We’re swiveling back around to a jocular, bullying culture, and I refuse to endorse that by mocking the Marvel nerds. Outside our imagination, there is no ur-Marvel fan, anyhow; one can watch Avengers and also enjoy La Strada. It’s not mutually exclusive to enjoy a terrible movie and also a good one, at least any more. So I’ll have to talk about money.
And there’s a lot of it. Deadpool and Wolverine has made approximately seven billion wheelbarrows full of money, and is set to make more. In a sense, it may be the shot in the arm capeshit needed—the MCU seemed like it was in danger until this week. Which is funny, because that’s the only overriding theme in the movie: Deadpool dubs himself “Marvel Jesus” and tells Wolverine “They’ll never stop making these. You’ll be here ‘til you’re ninety.”
They reiterate that line at the end. And it’s true—they have enough money to throw at Hugh Jackman that he’ll never stop donning the spandex. Same with Reynolds, and with Robert Downey jr. (recently announced to be returning). Combine this with the predatory business practices Disney takes toward competing films, choking them out by using greater market share to avoid sharing screens, a portrait begins to emerge of a capitalistic ouroboros. The snake eats its own tail, in a perfect loop. They’re gonna keep making these movies until the total collapse of the Walt Disney Company, or (more likely) the heat death of the universe.
Deadpool and Wolverine wasn’t a “good” movie, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Nor does it matter whether I do or don’t, it’s going to make gangbusters anyway. Capeshit-as-metacommentary upon itself only means that the film comments upon, not criticizes this development. It justifies its own lack of risk-taking, down to bringing back Jackman as Wolverine, and its own rushed appearance (making jokes about the bad fight scenes and special effects does not improve the fight scenes, or the special effects). But it’s the only game in the town of mass culture, so people are going to continue to play—some enthusiastically, some less so—until the blockage shifts. We’re in 2024, and while some films (I Saw the TV Glow, for example) seem to be aware of this, Deadpool and Wolverine is evidence that some major section of our cultural economy still hasn’t made it out of 2014.