Marvel Studios’ string of recent post-Avengers: Endgame films has had the fandom divided on whether the superhero genre is overdone. With the upcoming release of Deadpool & Wolverine, the star power buzz of a team-up long teased between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman has pushed the meter of Marvel Cinematic Universe excitement further than most recent releases, but can Marvel Jesus (as Deadpool calls himself) save the superhero genre?
The meta joke is unserious because in truth storytelling about heroic archetypes is historically cyclical. Sure, the discourse runs rampant on outrage because the tail end of Phase Four had mixed results with so many movies all at once, between Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever—an onslaught which had amazing highs but also some very tired lows. The span of films between 2021 and 2022 may still be having a lingering effect on movies in the current Phase Five because of all the internet discourse. So while Disney and Marvel have hit the brakes, we don’t think the superhero genre needs a literal saving, but a reset makes sense especially with Deadpool & Wolverine.
Parody has always been a tool to take a step back and take on the tropes in genre once there’s been too much pastiche. Secret agents had Get Smart and Austin Powers in response to James Bond; horror has run the gamut from Abbott and Costello to the Scary Movie franchise; Mel Brooks took on Star Wars with Spaceballs (with a new sequel in the works); and even Shrek had Disney re-invent itself. Now it’s time for superhero films to get the same treatment, and while there have been notable satires recently (especially Prime Video series The Boys), it looks like Marvel Studios is taking control of the narrative with Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth, who has been chomping at the bit for this crossover.
And while yes, Deadpool has popped in and out throughout the recent age of Marvel films as Fox’s aside to poke at the MCU, now he can fully reign free with Deadpool & Wolverine in the pantheon of parody. Deadpool in the comics was born out of parody, as a reaction to the state of comic book heroics as a sort of chaotic commentator self-aware of the world around him—a character type that’s been around for centuries, as seen with Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All those films like Spaceballs or Scary Movie (side note: we’d love for that franchise to come back and take on “elevated horror”) didn’t mark the end of the movies that came before; they celebrated and cleverly criticized the peaks their respective genres went to in order to get butts in seats. When something becomes overdone and too popular in cinema, one of the most wonderful things about it is that time where you can poke fun at it and wait for the return of fresher stories and lessons being learned from the missteps.
At this point, the years-long tease that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will finally be changed since Disney took over the Fox properties—after we thought Wanda would do in Multiverse of Madness, or that it would it fully happen in Loki season two, or there’d be more than that little X-Men nugget at the end of The Marvels—has been like the worst kind of edging that only Deadpool can address and poke fun at. As fans we look forward to stepping outside the fourth wall with Deadpool’s hand to guide us as Wolverine slashes timelines to finally break the MCU as we know it, so we can welcome the new one.
Deadpool & Wolverine opens in theaters July 26.
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