Deadpool and Wolverine Is the Toy Story 2 of Superhero Movies (2024)

The worst thing about the Deadpool movies isn’t their incessant snark or their edgelord posturing, the way Ryan Reynolds can’t seem to go more than a minute without winking at the camera or making some mildly off-color joke with the smug satisfaction of a naughty schoolboy. It’s their naked sentimentality, the way all that reflexive irony gives way to bumper-sticker bromides like “Family isn’t an F-word” and “The worst part about cancer isn’t what it does to you, but what it does to the people you love.” Sure, Wade Wilson, Reynolds’ “merc with a mouth,” is a professional killer who slices up people for fun and profit, but deep down, he’s just a big softie.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find myself, somewhere in the middle of Deadpool & Wolverine, experiencing a moment of genuine emotion. The movie itself could hardly be a more mercenary enterprise, a threequel that serves to integrate a wildly successful franchise into the wobbly Marvel Cinematic Universe, and to further untangle the jumble of intellectual property caused by Disney’s acquisition of Fox. The first two Deadpool movies made endless sport of their hero’s C-list status, his unfitness to share the screen with any but the most obscure and unwanted of X-Men despite the fact that they technically exist in the same intellectual property sandbox. In Deadpool 2, while strolling through their home base, Wade catches a brief glimpse of the core X-Men team—Professor X, Cyclops, the works—in an adjoining room, and they silently shut the door on him.

And yet, here he is, sharing a screen with Wolverine, a character he’s obsessed over and cursed out at length—and further, drawing Hugh Jackman back to a part he swore he’d finished playing after 2017’s Logan, a movie that seemed to have quite definitively killed off his nigh-indestructible superhero. But nothing is final in the multiverse, and Disney didn’t spend all that money buying up the rights to Fox’s Marvel characters just to have some nobody step into the role. So Jackman is back, bulking up his biceps and cashing a similarly hulking paycheck. (In one of his characteristic pokes at the fourth wall, Deadpool takes note of the fact that Jackman is recently divorced.) A fight to the death between characters who can heal from almost any wound is the stuff of comic-book dreams, but it can only be realized in a series where gore is played for laughs and blood flies with the abandon of children dousing each other with Super Soakers.

There are plot reasons why Deadpool & Wolverine’s titular heroes come to blows—and stabs, and shots—but the main one is that Logan has a short temper and Wade can’t stop running his mouth. Ryan Reynolds knows he has a face made for punching, even after it’s covered in fake burn scars, and he makes sure we see him undergo every torment imaginable. (At one point, Wolverine jabs Deadpool in the groin with his claws, then uses them to lift him over his head, bring him down hard, and break his back.) But the movie is also the product of another, equally grueling ordeal: the decades-long struggle to make Ryan Reynolds happen. As the Deadpool series is fond of reminding us, this isn’t Reynolds’ first shot at superhero stardom—in fact, it’s not even his first time starring as this particular character. In 2009, Reynolds played Deadpool as a mute, tattooed villain—a merc with no mouth—in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and two years later he was the lead in DC’s Green Lantern movie. It was the kind of role that could make a career, except that it almost ended his when the movie was an enormous flop. So when, in a string of gags that run through the end credits of Deadpool, Wade borrows a universe-hopping device to “clean up the timeline,” he pays a visit to Reynolds, beaming over his copy of the Green Lantern script, and puts a bullet through his skull.

Reynolds put everything into the first Deadpool, to the extent that he diverted his own salary toward having the film’s writers on set to constantly pep up the film’s dialogue. (Deadpool & Wolverine has five credited writers, including Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, and there are stretches where you can practically hear them all competing to yell out the funniest, most foul-mouthed one-liner.) The gamble paid off handsomely: The first two movies grossed more than $700 million apiece, a total that recent MCU entries have only fitfully achieved, and the new one is on track for the biggest opening weekend of the year. But Reynolds is aware as few are how close you can get to stardom without achieving it, and he’s had far more chances than most people get. Which turns out, in a strange way, to be what Deadpool & Wolverine is about.

Now that the contracts have been signed and Deadpool has officially joined the Marvel universe, the series’ stakes have gone from interpersonal to intergalactic. They’re even higher because the once unstoppable MCU is fully in its flop era, reworking long-range plans as its stewards struggle with box-office failures and casting changes. (“Welcome to the MCU,” Deadpool tells Logan. “You’re joining at a bit of a low point.”) In the retro bureaucracy of the multiverse-governing Time Variance Authority (you remember them from Loki, right?), Deadpool is informed that his world has been rendered unstable by the absence of its “anchor entity,” and without that person, the entire thing will eventually cease to exist. When we learn that entity is Logan, and that Wade’s world essentially comprises the Marvel characters formerly owned by Fox, the whole thing snaps into focus. Without Wolverine, the X-Men aren’t worth keeping around. It would be like owning all of Spider-Man’s universe except for the part with Spider-Man in it.

Wade’s mission to protect his timeline also becomes a mission on behalf of the characters who didn’t quite make it, the heroes whose futures were snuffed out by subpar opening weekends or C-suite changes. Banished to the Void, where the Time Variance Authority sends things that no longer have any purpose—including a crumbling logo for the former 20^th Century Fox—Wade and Logan encounter a string of Marvel’s has-beens and never-wases, played by actors whose mere appearance is a sight gag unto itself. Some were big in their day, some never even had a chance, but they’ve faded from view in one way or another, their characters gathering dust on the shelf. (I’m going to spoil these appearances now, so if you want to go in fresh, just skip the next paragraph.)

It’s a thrill to see Wesley Snipes’ Blade again, and a comedic coup to finally see Channing Tatum’s take on the Cajun card-thrower Gambit, the star of a solo spinoff movie that was never made. (Its planned release date was March 13, 2020, so this may have been a blessing in disguise.) But there’s poignancy in their appearances, too. Snipes’ Blade brags that he’s one of a kind, unaware that his iconic role is scheduled to pass to Mahershala Ali in 2025, and when Logan offers Elektra (Jennifer Garner) his condolences on the passing of Daredevil (Ben Affleck), Garner cuts him off with a crisp, “It’s fine.” They all seem a little worse for wear, happy to be extracted from whatever limbo unused characters inhabit (the otherwise successful Blade franchise ended in a flurry of bitter lawsuits, while Elektra became the lowest-grossing Marvel movie since Howard the Duck), but too bruised by past experience to think things will go any better this time. (Spoilers over.)

Deadpool & Wolverine gives these castoffs an ending of sorts, even if it’s not the one they would have wanted. And there’s something oddly moving about it, even in a proudly crass movie whose bittersweet nostalgia is tinged with corporate triumphalism. The juxtaposition is no less calculated than it is when Deadpool stops cracking wise about sex toys and starts talking about love, but for better or worse, this time it works. Watching these characters whose fictional lives were cut short by the vagaries of an unforgiving industry, I thought of all the disappointments that fandom is heir to: the abruptly canceled shows whose mysteries will never be unraveled, the beloved stories bungled on their journey to the screen, the Coming Soons that never came. Dotted in among the quips and Easter eggs is the superhero equivalent of Toy Story 2, a mournful goodbye to the things we once held dear, even if some of those things weren’t that great to begin with.