Last year was in fact a nadir for the MCU. While Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did respectable business and earned $846 million worldwide, that number was down from Vol. 2’s $864 million cume from over half a decade earlier. That movie was also seen as another swan song for the MCU’s 2010s glory days. Conversely, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels’ bleak box office runs fed into the seemingly demonstrable phenomenon of “superhero fatigue” when juxtaposed with WB/DC’s outright disastrous 2023.
Well, if 2023 is a nadir, then Deadpool & Wolverine shows a likely path forward for sunnier days in the MCU. The film is again playing better than any non-Spidey Marvel movie released in this decade. By contrast, the now-third highest MCU opening of the 2020s is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which grossed an impressive $187 million in its first three days. However, that film was also divisive among fans for the way it subverted expectations, and its “B+” CinemaScore foreshadowed what turned out to be a steep 67 percent drop in its second weekend, and a box office run that failed to reach $1 billion despite that massive opening (and the PG-13 advantage it has over Deadpool & Wolverine).
This is all a way to say that despite the fan-service excesses of Deadpool & Wolverine leaving some critics (including admittedly this one) mixed on the film, those qualities are obviously playing like gangbusters with the fans the movie is made for. And when one considers that the other eye-popping MCU box office success of this decade is Spider-Man: No Way Home, it is easy to draw a correlation: both Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine work as straight-ahead, unironic, and deeply nostalgic love letters to the superhero genre’s past. (One might point out the irony in a Doctor Strange movie being more transgressive with its cameos than Deadpool.) D&W and NWH benefitted both from bringing back Tobey Maguire and Hugh Jackman in their signature superhero roles 20 or more years after they first played them. That each film was also able to redeem characterizations that audiences rejected the first time, be it Andrew Garfield as Spidey or the many spoilerish cameos in Deadpool & Wolverine, is likewise telling.
When compared to the struggles Marvel has endured recently with launching new characters or IP like the Eternals or two-thirds of The Marvels’ lead characters, there is a seeming lesson in this about the advantages of looking backward at the moment and playing the hits… especially if those hits wears an “X” on their uniforms.
Almost infamously at this point, Marvel Studios has yet to create their own version of the beloved X-Men, a group of characters whose popularity seems as evergreen as Spider-Man or Batman. Many fans are desperate to see the X-Men get the MCU treatment. One reading of Deadpool & Wolverine’s achingly wistful mid-credits sequence, which resembles a valedictorian address for the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies, is to think Marvel Studios is saying goodbye to that legacy and ready to turn the page to their own era. Some fans, including our own Joe George, are anxious to finally see that happen.
But after this weekend… we shall see? (Sorry, Joe.) While Marvel has had great success at rebooting Spider-Man with Tom Holland and looks poised to do the same with the Fantastic Four next year, the studio’s biggest recent hits involved cherrypicking certain aspects of old superhero movies—Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina here, Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds there—and bringing them back for maximum applause. While one way to read Deadpool & Wolverine is that it’s a fond farewell to the Fox-Verse, another is to see it as a bridge for Marvel to pick and choose which elements they’d like to bring back.