As such, I think the movie leans a little too much into the nostalgia factor. I don’t have an overwhelming amount of love for any of the Fox movies; I think the original X-Men films are good, and Jackman is absolutely the best part of them, but I tend to favor the animated versions of the X-Men.
There’s also just this overwhelming sensation that we’re going to see both Reynolds and Jackman again, in 2027’s multiverse-focused Avengers: Secret Wars if not before. Deadpool even says that Marvel is going to make Jackman play Wolverine until he’s 90. So any sense of “closure” feels accordingly muted. I guess the future of the X-Men in the MCU is just these two characters, which I felt like we already knew before going into it.
The action setpieces are good, and I think Deadpool and Wolverine’s emotional arcs are handled well. But the jokes are pretty hit (Deadpool cracking that he has an extra bone in his body when he watches Gossip Girl) or miss (an in-poor-taste Boy Scout leader joke that you can probably figure out for yourself just by reading this). In short, it’s a perfectly serviceable Marvel movie.
This film is on track to open huge—bigger than Inside Out 2, 2024’s opening-weekend record holder, and bigger than the original Deadpool, which is currently the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history. So in that sense, the MCU has been saved, like this movie was supposed to do; it’s going to demonstrate that under the right circumstances, Marvel’s characters can still be a license to print money. At the same time, this is Deadpool making “LOL Marvel” jokes about Marvel’s recent struggles, and making them in the context of a Marvel movie that’s also a fan-service free-for-all for people who enjoyed other, more successful superhero movies. Is there anything about this movie that does point the way to the future, for these characters and for this franchise in general?
Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has described Deadpool & Wolverine as an “eight” out of ten on the impact scale, with only Endgame and Infinity War being higher. But it doesn’t really feel like that’s the case. There’s a vague tease that Deadpool will eventually become important; at one point Matthew Macfadyen’s Paradox shows Wade a clip of him dead in Thor’s arms and then handwaves it away. But Deadpool & Wolverine ends with Deadpool back home in his universe, and the only existing MCU characters he’s interacted with are Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15 from Loki and Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan.
It’s a little confusing, candidly. On the one hand, I appreciate how standalone the film is, even with all the meta jokes. But the whole selling of this movie was the fact that Deadpool was supposed to be coming into the MCU. I guess the big conclusion is that Hugh Jackman is officially back in play; the movie ends with this new variant of Logan alive and well and living in Deadpool’s universe. That, combined with this brief tease about Deadpool’s future, likely tees them both up for a future appearance in Secret Wars.
