What is a movie? It sounds like a silly question, perhaps, but it’s one that’s been rattling around my head ever since I walked out of Deadpool & Wolverine last Friday. Marvel’s cameo-stuffed, fourth-wall-breaking superhero sequel made a staggering $438.3m across its opening weekend – a record for an R-rated film. It feels in many ways like a watershed moment. But not a good one. If we are watching, as some critics have suggested, the death of cinema happen before our eyes, then it’s taken the form of a public execution.
There have been plenty of “worse” movies than Deadpool & Wolverine. Even within the remit of Marvel’s own conveyor-belt oeuvre, last year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder were far messier affairs – structurally chaotic and aesthetically rebarbative to the extent that Deadpool & Wolverine is not. But Deadpool feels somehow the most cynical of all of the canon to date, the most spiritually and creatively bereft. It is a film that is about absolutely nothing – a film with no discernable purpose or artistic ambitions, beyond the perpetuation of its own corporate myth.
There are jokes about the Disney-Fox merger. Jokes about producer Kevin Feige. Jokes about the widespread disillusionment towards the Marvel franchise. Around halfway through the film, the two eponymous leads (played by Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, the latter exhuming – literally at one point – his famous X-Men character) encounter a team of throwback superheroes: Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Wesley Snipes’ Blade, Chris Evans’s Johnny Storm (from Fantastic Four), Channing Tatum’s Gambit (never produced) and Dafne Keen’s mini-Wolverine from Logan.
The film invites us to gawp at these comebacks. Meta-referential dialogue explains that these characters, ostensibly stuck in some kind of out-of-universe “void”, are simply trying to get the endings they deserve. What these “deserved endings” actually look like in practice is fewer than 10 lines of dialogue apiece – in Snipes’ case, mostly just repeating catchphrases from the first three Blade films – before they all drive out to a skirmish in the desert and get swallowed up by some kind of deadly CGI air monster. There’s no attempt at characterisation, no point behind the meta-joke. The insistence that audiences are for some reason gagging to see Reynolds’ Deadpool exchange one line of insipid banter with Tatum’s Gambit, is baffling. Audiences didn’t love Blade because Snipes just showed up, stood there and barked catchphrases – he was part of a story, with a proper character, and stakes, and intentionality. That Marvel cannot see the difference – or, even worse, if it can see the difference but chooses to ignore it – is surely damning.
It’s telling, too, that Reynolds has spent much of the Deadpool & Wolverine press tour performatively retching in the vague direction of The Green Lantern, his critically panned 2011 DC Comics blockbuster that, were it owned by Marvel and not DC, would surely have been reclaimed here as a “forgotten gem” along with the other dross.
To be clear, Deadpool & Wolverine is not the first movie of its kind. In many ways, it’s simply re-applying the lessons learned from 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home – a film that made waves (and more than $2bn) with a glut of surprise cameos, giving Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and more the chance to reprise their bygone Spider-Man roles. But even that film offered more in the way of story and purpose than Deadpool & Wolverine. Garfield, Maguire and co were given the barest bones of character arcs, to play around with as they saw fit. (Garfield ended up making considerably more of the opportunity.)
If you’ll allow me to get a little philosophical about things: how do we define what is and isn’t a movie? Over the past two decades, Marvel has re-shaped Hollywood in its own image, whittling away some of the things that made filmmaking unique as an art form and shifting it towards something more televisual and serialised. We call Deadpool & Wolverine a movie because it is released in cinemas, and is two hours long, but other than these technicalities, it shares almost nothing with a traditional blockbuster, when it comes to intent. The problem isn’t that it tells its story badly – it’s that it has no interest in telling a story well at all. It’s interested exclusively in the maintenance and consolidation of Marvel’s brand, in its viability as both product and advertisement, a snake eating its own tail.
“Turn off your brain and enjoy it for what it is,” has become the prevailing mantra of the Deadpool defenders on social media. And of course, people are allowed to enjoy what they like. But freebasing cocaine is surely enjoyable to many people; that doesn’t mean we should all get on board with its production and distribution. If cinema starts losing the notion that it even ought to function as a work of art – if it becomes not just bad art, but some new and insidious other thing – then the jig, as it were, is truly up. If Deadpool & Wolverine is what the future of cinema looks like, it’ll take more than a few plucky heroes to save it.
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is in cinemas now