At this point, it’s all but guaranteed that Deadpool & Wolverine is going to break records at the box office this weekend. The movie made a reported $96 million on Friday and is headed to $195 million to $205 million for the weekend. That’s the highest opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie. And it seems likely Deadpool & Wolverine will nab a slot in the all-time openings list, regardless of rating. But speaking of broken records, if there’s one thing Hollywood does over and over, it’s take all the wrong lessons from a massive success.
In this case, just to venture a guess, one of the lessons is going to be “more R-rated superhero movies, people love those.” And while that’s not necessarily wildly wrong — look at the gross for Joker, which was over a billion dollars — it completely misses the point of why Deadpool & Wolverine is already a massive success. Yes, the raunch, the language, and the over-the-top constant use of the f-word are part of the package. But that comes with the territory of a Deadpool movie — and both the first and second flicks weren’t successful because they were R-rated, but perhaps in spite of that.
What worked about the first one was a number of things, but I’d chalk it up to Ryan Reynolds’s faithful adaptation of the comic book character on screen, which, sure, leaned into a bloody R-rating. But it was more about seeing Deadpool come to life perfectly, with love and respect for the source material. That’s enough to make a pretty good fan film — using that non-dismissively, because Reynolds clearly was a fan, making a film — but the movie still wouldn’t have worked without the emotional grounding of Deadpool’s relationship with his girlfriend, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). The care in the movie wasn’t confined to adaptation, it was also about care for the characters and their inner lives, too.
That expanded into the sequel, which also threw in a slew more jokes and a ton more characters. But at its best, Deadpool 2 worked because it kept that scrappy can-do spirit, and made sure to give the title character a story that challenged him emotionally. It arguably didn’t hit as hard as the first movie for a variety of reasons (fridging Vanessa, for example), but it still worked, and clearly crushed at the box office.
That brings us to Deadpool & Wolverine, which packs in even more jokes and even more characters. But while the cameos (which let’s be honest are, for the most part, supporting roles) are wild and driving fans to the theater to not get spoiled, what fans are responding to the most are the same things that worked in the first two movies. It isn’t Deadpool saying the f-word every three seconds; it’s the relationship between Deadpool and Wolverine. It’s the TLC put into the history of these characters and bringing them together.
And it’s bringing the “cameos” because they fit thematically to what the movie is saying, not for funsies. Look no further than the same sort of parade of guest stars in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Was it fun to see Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) back, or Hayley Atwell suit up as Captain Carter? Sure. But that sequence, which never had any of the actors in the same place at the same time for the most part, felt hollow because it was a random assemblage of characters who don’t care about each other, never met before, and will (probably) never meet again. Contrast that with the resistance fighters in Deadpool & Wolverine, who are there because they’ve all gone through the gauntlet of frustrations with Marvel franchises that either stalled or never got off the ground.
Yes it’s metatextual and winky, but it succeeds because of that same care we’re talking about, not because of — spoilers past this point — Channing Tatum’s impossible to understand raunch filtered through Cajun patois, or Blade (Wesley Snipes) calling back to his “some motherf**kers are always trying to ice-skate uphill” line, as fun as those moments are.
There’s also the lightning in a bottle factor here that’s impossible to reproduce. The last Deadpool movie was released in 2018, and people generally loved it. And not only that, Ryan Reynolds has been on a non-stop hot streak since the original movie was released in 2016. Logan, Hugh Jackman’s last appearance as Wolverine, was in 2017 — and both that movie and Jackman in the role are beloved by audiences. And while it’s a far shorter gap, Deadpool & Wolverine is the first Marvel movie in theaters since The Marvels last November, and the only Marvel movie this year. After 15 years of nearly non-stop multiple Marvel movies per year, the audience has been pent up and excited. All three of these factors contributed to the massive box office, and just can’t be reproduced in a lab.
Is there a chance that Hollywood studios will see all this and think “what we need to do is bring care and love to our characters, and bring that sort of earnest consideration to our audience?” Nope. It’s the R-rating that will be the takeaway. On Marvel’s end, it will most likely be that audiences need more Deadpool and Wolverine, despite the movie giving closure to both characters, as well as the Deadpool trilogy. It’ll be all the wrong lessons, and they’ll be surprised when whatever R-rated superhero team-up comes next — Ant-Man & Eternals, anyone? — just doesn’t perform the same way. And then someone else will come along, break box office records, and we’ll repeat the same pattern, yet again.
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