Audiences to 'Deadpool & Wolverine': Buy, Buy, Buy

‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Reverses Marvel’s Box Office Slump

The superhero sequel was on pace to collect about $200 million at North American theaters over the weekend, a record opening for an R-rated movie.

The New York Times Brooks Barnes

An impressive result anyway you slice it:

Marvel Studios, trying to move past a pair of box office humiliations, deployed two of its most popular characters over the weekend and hit a mother lode.

The potty-mouthed Deadpool and hard-drinking Wolverine — packaged together for the first time on movie screens — were on pace to sell roughly $200 million in tickets in the United States and Canada, box office analysts said on Saturday. “Deadpool & Wolverine” will easily set a record for the largest R-rated movie opening in Hollywood history, even when adjusting for inflation. The current record-holder, “Deadpool” (2016), arrived to more than $175 million in today’s dollars.

At last, an "adjusting for inflation" caveat! No caveat even required here! And it's hardly a surprise given that audiences seemed primed for a few reasons:

1. It officially ushered Fox's Marvel assets into Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe (finally)
2. It did so with Wolverine, undoubtedly the most beloved character from Fox's comic assets
3. It did so with Deadpool, undoubtedly the least Disney-friendly character from Fox's comic assets
4. These two have a history – a bad one – in cinematic form, which they somehow turned into a positive here, years later
5. They marketed the hell out of this thing for months and months and months – years even! – leveraging Ryan Reynolds' social media prowess and branding persona to the maximum extent possible

It checked all the boxes I wrote about just last week following the success of Twitsters:

So Hollywood is back again. After being over again. After being back again. The reality is that here is about as deep as you can read into these numbers: if a movie features content (including stars) that people want to see at the right time, it will do well. Yes, it has to be marketed appropriately (so people will know that they can see it), which seems increasingly hard for Hollywood to do, but I believe it really is that simple. It doesn't require complex equations or deep-dives into the psyche of moviegoers. If you release something that people want to see, they will see it.

Add in another element to both films: they're just fun. People go to movies to have fun. The last few years of Marvel (not to mention DC, released by Warner Bros) have felt like homework.¹ These are comic book movies! Back to Barnes:

Marvel badly needed a win. Two of its releases last year, “The Marvels” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” disappointed at the box office, ending an unbroken 15-year winning streak for the boutique studio and beginning a period of intense Wall Street scrutiny. Marvel’s weakness played a role in proxy battles for Disney board seats earlier this year. (In the end, Disney fended off the activist investors, including Nelson Peltz, a founder of Trian Partners, and Ike Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment.)

Superheroes are not the sure things they used to be. DC Studios, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, is working on its fourth reboot strategy in eight years following disappointments like “The Flash,” “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” and “Blue Beetle.” Sony has struggled with “Spider-Man” spinoffs like “Madame Web” and “Morbius.” The problem is that the movie and television marketplace is awash in the characters, and some of the most popular ones have already been fully exploited (at least for now).

Every single one of those movies was either a slog, confusing, boring, or just bad – or some combination of each of those.² This isn't hard to figure out.

Having seen Deadpool & Wolverine, I can confirm it's mostly good fun. I mean, it's insanely violent and crude, but if you're at all into that, fun. Personally, I found the relentless jokes fairly exhausting after awhile but...

...the filmmaking team was clever in how they brought back and integrated Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Aaron Stanford, Tyler Mane, and the rest. Channing Tatum was in particular an interesting one since he was tied to a Gambit movie that was never actually made. And they way they used him here seemed to make it clear that it should not be made – but both star and movie had fun with that. The plot point was giving these characters fitting ends, and they did.

Bringing back Chris Evans as Johnny Storm was in particular well done and seemed to presage what was about to hit in Robert Downey Jr. coming back to the MCU as well – but not as Iron Man. Mostly, it's great that Disney allowed everyone to have fun with the sacred brand and push some envelopes.

Marvel movie plots have grown increasingly convoluted, at least for casual viewers. “Deadpool & Wolverine” has something to do with a “sacred timeline” and “anchor beings” and a “metaphysical graveyard” called the Void. (“Good luck if you’re coming in with no prior knowledge,” David Sims, a critic for The Atlantic, wrote in his review.) But “Deadpool & Wolverine” was mostly built as a love letter to Marvel fans — an effort to show die-hards that the studio had rediscovered its mojo.

In one scene, Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool, looks directly at the screen and says, “Nerds, it’s about to get good.” A bloody battle between Deadpool and Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman, commences.

Given the above cameos, this one was arguably the most convoluted movie. But they were able to overcome that by pleasing different factions of fans. Comic fans, yes. But also fans of the older films, fans of the animated shows, even NSYNC fans. We all knew from the market that Wolverine would wear the yellow suit, but when he puts on the mask... No one cared about the plot at that point.

¹ You hear that, Disney? Take a page from this and translate it to the Star Wars universe before it's too late? And it doesn't have to be funny to be fun, just to be clear.

² To be fair, I liked The Flash. It wasn't perfect, but it had some fun vibes very similar to what Marvel just did with Deadpool & Wolverine -- Michael Keaton back as Batman! Nic Cage as could-have-been Superman! -- but its star became a problem which made the marketing problematic. And the fact that this was the end of the old DC regime, ahead of James Gunn taking over, so it was clearly a lameduck, versus Deadpool & Wolverine's restart.