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After a lengthy opening credits sequence featuring the oft-mishandled merc with a mouth that is Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) dancing with a skeleton (among other things) to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” the titular antihero apologizes for some of the “necrophilic” vibes he may be putting out. For the next two hours of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” that initial affectation never really goes away. Disney has revived a Deadpool and Wolverine crossover after his skeletal abomination that last interacted with Wolverine in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and doesn’t shy away from the ensuing undertones. In resurrecting Deadpool’s titular companion (and many more characters) for this film, it exhibits a desire for what’s dead and gone so strong it’s almost sexual — and the most unpleasant part is how satisfying it is.
To recap the modern critiques of superhero movies would be beating a dead horse into ash, so it’s fortunate that Deadpool’s metanarrative ties to this conflict. Seen as a fundamentally unserious superhero, civilian car salesman and romantic partner, Deadpool has a separation from the typical Marvel hero that could not be more evident. His longing to join the likes of the Avengers and the mainstream Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity parallels MCU filmmakers’ desires to contribute to the canon of cinema rather than its downfall. To see how Deadpool then unconventionally saves the day shows a metanarrative and literal path to salvation for the MCU and cinema, as it raked in more than $1 billion at the global box office by itself before four new Marvel films are released in 2025. So how do they do it?
Well, we’ve certainly seen many ways over the past few years of how to not successfully adapt comic book stories. The most obvious conclusion from these failures is that when stories are intrinsically tied with their title’s superhero, what matters most is character. “Deadpool & Wolverine” definitely has a whole lot of character and a whole lot of characters — which makes every hero distinct with a surprisingly careful script and unsurprisingly star-studded cast. Reynolds might just be playing a version (or versions) of himself again, bringing more of an ironic, frat boy-homoeroticism rather than capturing comic-book Deadpool’s chaotic pansexuality directed toward the rest of his bombshell-studded cast. But that’s where the flaws in his portrayal stop as his performance claws deeper into the antihero’s emotional core. Speaking of claws, what about the other half of our title?
When it’s revealed that Deadpool has to bring Wolverine back to his divergent timeline to avoid its destruction (another meta dig at Fox’s over-reliance on the character), Hugh Jackman (“The Greatest Showman”) unsurprisingly slips back into the role as well as his character slips into his comic-accurate suit. Forming the other half of the Deadpool: Wolverine will-they/won’t-they-fuck-(each other up)-in-the-back-of-a-Honda-Odyssey dynamic, Wolverine is the ideal straight man (comedically at least, he’s canonically in a poly relationship with Cyclops), tempering his chaos for those not quite sold on Deadpool’s specific brand of comedy. Like Deadpool though, this alternate timeline version of Wolverine is another superhero universally (multiversally?) scorned, now being forced to search for meaning in an infinite multiverse rather than the bottom of a bottle. But what is that meaning? What is the meaning of this film’s (very expected) cameos from the 20th Century Fox Marvel universes besides nostalgia-baiting? What is the meaning of creating X-Men movie #14 and Marvel movie #34?
Well, the meaning of those aspects is the same as any individual life in the face of infinity: It means nothing, and so the choices made with them are everything. Nothing is sacred in “Deadpool & Wolverine” — not corpses, not cinema, not MPA ratings. There comes a point where the defilement of all these things — literally and figuratively bringing them back from the dead for the audience to obsess over — loops back around to reveal just how much the creators care for these characters. Deadpool beginning his third movie with incredible violence and dance moves alongside a skeleton is how every spectacle of the movie progresses afterward: It uses the decay and detritus of Marvel and Fox’s film failures to give them one last ride, one where they finally get to be on top, the desire to continue screwing with what’s dead and gone so strong and perverse that it feels fundamentally necrophilic.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” is Marvel’s “Annabel Lee,” not changing paths from Edgar Allan Poe upon the realization that they can no longer “lie down … in her tomb by the sounding sea.” They have found themselves at their Penthesilea-esqe eventuality, horrified in their post-necrophilic clarity, but maybe they can finally move on as Reynolds, Jackman and every other action figure unburied for this movie can be cleaned up and put back in the toy box. This is a cautionary parable to every other studio out there: The constant cash-grab consolidation of art, the endless layering of post-modern cynicism and the corporate necrophilic desire to abuse the corpse of every IP ever is doomed to collapse in on itself. The responsibility is both on studios to complicate their creations carefully, lest they make cinema go supernova to force a return to form, and on audiences (as always) to decide and support the art that they want to see. It’s your move, Marvel.
Let me say bye, bye, bye to these heroes. Goodnight, my sweet Fox superhero royalty (but hopefully not royalties).
And good riddance.
Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.
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