Deadpool Is the Perfect Marvel Hero, For Better or Worse

The following post contains very minor spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.

From almost the first moment that Disney acquired Fox, Marvel fans have asked one question:

“How is Disney going to f— up Deadpool?”

Even if you generally enjoyed the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that was not an unreasonable question. Marvel’s movies are, one and all, family-friendly PG-13 affairs. The two Fox Deadpool movies were bloody, explicit, profane R-rated adults-only productions. The MCU is filled with hero banter, but in his movies, Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool makes quips that break the fourth wall and destroy the illusion of an onscreen reality.

He takes nothing seriously, and skewers sacred cows left and right with two adamantium swords. In the second Deadpool, Deadpool went back in time and killed the Deadpool from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, then tracked down “Ryan Reynolds” and splattered his brains all all over the script for Green Lantern. And that’s nothing compared to 2016’s Deadpool, where Wade Wilson ordered a pizza with pineapple and olives on it.

I mean, can you imagine???

READ MORE: All the Deadpool & Wolverine Plot Holes That Make No Sense

If that wasn’t bad enough, Disney is notoriously touchy about making fun of themselves, or doing anything that might tarnish their unblemished image as America’s top purveyor of wholesome entertainment for kids of all ages. Disney was arguably the worst company to make a Deadpool movie. They’re the guys who make the stuff that Deadpool was created to mock.

Put it this way: Would you hire the same people who produced the Winnie the Pooh animated movie to make Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey? Probably not! But that’s sort of what happened here. For years, fans fretted that Marvel would turn Deadpool 3 into a PG-13 disaster; that they’d refuse to let the title character slice bad guys up or shoot them with his twin pistols, or make sex jokes about other superheroes.

That’s not how it worked out. Marvel made an R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine, which is somehow the most brightly colored and comic booky movie in the entire franchise and chock full of pegging jokes and cocaine references and multiple scenes where Reynolds and co-star Hugh Jackman hack and stab and chop and slice each other to pieces for minutes on end. Financially, that decision already paid off; Deadpool & Wolverine shattered the record for the biggest opening weekend for an R-rated film in history.

A PG-13 Deadpool 3 would probably have been a disaster. But all the worrying about the movie’s rating failed to account for one key detail. Deadpool doesn’t just work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he is — for better or worse — the perfect character for the current MCU.

About 11 years ago, as Marvel mania was just starting to hit a fever pitch, I wrote a piece for The Dissolve (RIP) called “The Big Come-On: In a Teaser Culture, the Hints fo What’s to Come Matter More Than the Events Themselves.” In it, I wrote about the effect of post-credits scenes, the online trailer dissection industrial complex, and forever franchises like the MCU on Hollywood as a whole. Blockbusters of the early 2010s fully embraced what I described as “teaser culture” — where encouraging viewers to perpetually ask questions about what might happen in the future became far more important than anything happening in theaters in the present.

While Marvel’s movies still exist in a perpetual state of teasing, the current MCU does just as much looking back (and gazing into their own cinematic navel) as looking ahead. After all, Marvel‘s current “Multiverse Saga” made clear that there is no such thing as linear time in these films; every moment, past, present, and future is happening simultaneously, at least from the perspective of the beings like Mr. Paradox of the Time Variance Authority, who serves as Deadpool & Wolverine’s villain.

Marvel’s recent films (plus TV shows like X-Men ’97) keep doubling down on the company’s labyrinthian history. That’s especially true of Deadpool & Wolverine, which does almost no teasing at all. Its post-credits scene doesn’t set up the inevitable MCU X-Men movie, or hint where Deadpool and Wolverine will show up next. It doesn’t even include a title card reading “Deadpool & Wolverine will return,” which Marvel used to include on almost everyone one of their movies — hell, they threw at the end of Eternals.

Instead, Deadpool & Wolverine presents an endless parade of Marvel (and Fox X-Men) in-jokes, cameos, and references. Fans love to look for little Easter eggs in MCU movies; the scenes and lines and costumes directly inspired by specific issues or artists from Marvel Comics. There are so many of those in Deadpool & Wolverine it’s almost harder to find the moments that aren’t Easter eggs, than the ones that are.

Plus you have Deadpool at the center of it all, a character who is aware he exists within a fictional reality. Throughout Deadpool & Wolverine, in which he dubs himself “Marvel Jesus,” Deadpool cracks jokes about Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, and the lowly state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2024 (at least until Deadpool & Wolverine started breaking box-office records). Easter egg videos like the ones we make on ScreenCrush’s YouTube channel are almost superfluous at this point; you barely need Ryan Arey to tell you where the Easter eggs in Deadpool & Wolverine are. Deadpool tells you himself right in the actual movie.

Deadpool’s schtick would not have worked during the early phases of the MCU, which were far more self-serious and committed to the idea of building this massive yet plausible fictional reality like a celluloid Jenga tower. The fabric of reality seems far more flimsy in the Multiverse Saga. These days, death is essentially meaningless in the MCU. No matter what happens in one reality can always be undone in another. (See: The resurrection of Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine after his death in Logan.) So who cares if Deadpool makes a Gossip Girl joke?

The same goes for Deadpool & Wolverine’s premise, in which the Fox X-Men Universe is dying and only Deadpool is going to be brought by the TVA to the Sacred Timeline, but Deadpool refuses to let his friends die and so he recruits a new Wolverine to help him save his reality. While that reads on paper like a massive story, on the screen, the stakes seem tiny to nonexistent. More than an hour of Deadpool & Wolverine takes place in “The Void,” an exile at the end of time and space. The characters wander around for a while — sometimes they’re in a desert landscape, at other points it seems like they’re in a forest — but basically the movie is set nowhere and the characters go nowhere until the eventual climactic battle where the fate of the entire multiverse is at stake.

Supposedly Deadpool or Wolverine will need to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect their world, but even before you see how that turns out, there’s nothing on the line because, again, there are an infinite number of Deadpool and Wolverines they could follow in the future. (See: The aforementioned resurrection of Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine after his death in Logan.)

As soon as you examine any aspect of this concept up close, it falls apart. It really only makes sense on a meta level. Replace Mr. Paradox with Kevin Feige, and Deadpool and Wolverine with Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, and you essentially have the story of what Disney/Marvel have been trying to do behind the scenes of the MCU for the last five years.

Deadpool & Wolverine does invent an in-story explanation for the death of the Fox X-Men Universe. Apparently, when Wolverine “died” in Logan his began unraveling his world, because he was that universe’s “anchor being,” a person so important his very existence held together his entire reality. Again, this is both an utterly ridiculous story concept, and a fairly accurate description, on a meta level, of those Fox X-Men movies. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was the best and most central figure in them. That universe was never the same without Jackman after he retired, and it wouldn’t have lasted much longer before it withered away and died, whether or not Marvel had bought it.

If you had to name one “anchor being” for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I think most people would probably pick Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. That could even explain why the MCU has generally fared more poorly since Tony Stark’s death in Avengers: Endgame. That franchise was arguably on the same downward trajectory post-Downey as the Fox X-Men movies were without Jackman (at least until Marvel announced RDJr. was coming back to play Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday).

After Deadpool & Wolverine, though, I think a case could be made that the anchor being of the MCU isn’t Iron Man. It’s Deadpool. He fits into the Multiverse Saga better than any of their other characters. He’s the living, breathing embodiment of what these Marvel movies are now: Self-referential in-jokes, and deep cut callbacks. Frankly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe right now almost doesn’t make sense without him.