This story contains minor spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.
With Deadpool & Wolverine hitting theaters today and Comic-Con International kicking off in San Diego, GQ culture editor Alex Pappademas checks in with regular GQ contributor William Goodman about the state of the Marvel universe.
Alex Pappademas: William, you have seen Deadpool & Wolverine and I have not, but I’ve read all the spoilers, because that is my chosen way of absorbing superhero movies these days.
So here’s my question. Marvel’s had the rights to the X-Men and various associated mutant characters since the Disney-Fox merger in 2019, but so far they’ve been used pretty sparingly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We saw the Fox version of Quicksilver in WandaVision, and Kelsey Grammer's Beast showed up at the end of Marvels, but that’s kind of been it.
We've known since the trailer dropped that this movie will feature two characters from the Fox X-family interacting with the MCU via the Time Variance Authority from Loki, and I think a lot of people were expecting this storyline to in some way lay the groundwork for a future version of the MCU that has the X-Men in it. What I’m hearing instead is that, if anything, the movie is more of a farewell to past iterations of these characters, with Hugh Jackman’s reprise of Wolverine being the first of many, many curtain-call cameos for superhero-movie actors who are probably not going to play these parts again going forward.
All that established: What were your expectations going into this, and what was your experience like?
William Goodman: As someone who covers these movies for a living, I think I was expecting a riff on the comic Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, but with the TVA recruiting Deadpool to kill off his universe of characters. That idea is on the table for about five minutes before Deadpool declares he won’t kill his friends. So the movie becomes about him finding a new way to save his universe, and that involves saving Wolverine from his fate at the end of Logan. Only, the movie goes out of its way to show that there’s no coming back from that big of an ending, and that specific version of the character is indeed dead and gone. Instead, Deadpool settles for recruiting an absolute loser of a Wolverine, who he plucks from the timeline in hopes of fixing things.
You hit the nail on the head about it being a farewell. To wit: the credits play over a high school video-yearbook-like montage full of behind-the-scenes footage from all the Fox movies — it’s even scored to Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” for maximum effect/absurdity. That’s to say nothing of the various reappearances of old characters from the Fox/Marvel properties. We won’t spoil them here, but the nice thing is that they’re a little more substantial than just cameos.
As such, I think the movie leans a little too much into the nostalgia factor. I don’t have an overwhelming amount of love for any of the Fox movies; I think the original X-Men films are good, and Jackman is absolutely the best part of them, but I tend to favor the animated versions of the X-Men.
There’s also just this overwhelming sensation that we’re going to see both Reynolds and Jackman again, in 2027's multiverse-focused Avengers: Secret Wars if not before. Deadpool even says that Marvel is going to make Jackman play Wolverine until he’s 90. So any sense of “closure” feels accordingly muted. I guess the future of the X-Men in the MCU is just these two characters, which I felt like we already knew before going into it.
The action setpieces are good, and I think Deadpool and Wolverine's emotional arcs are handled well. But the jokes are pretty hit (Deadpool cracking that he has an extra bone in his body when he watches Gossip Girl) or miss (an in-poor-taste Boy Scout leader joke that you can probably figure out for yourself just by reading this). In short, it’s a perfectly serviceable Marvel movie.
This film is on track to open huge—bigger than Inside Out 2, 2024’s opening-weekend record holder, and bigger than the original Deadpool, which is currently the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history. So in that sense, the MCU has been saved, like this movie was supposed to do; it’s going to demonstrate that under the right circumstances, Marvel’s characters can still be a license to print money. At the same time, this is Deadpool making “LOL Marvel” jokes about Marvel’s recent struggles, and making them in the context of a Marvel movie that’s also a fan-service free-for-all for people who enjoyed other, more successful superhero movies. Is there anything about this movie that does point the way to the future, for these characters and for this franchise in general?
Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has described Deadpool & Wolverine as an “eight” out of ten on the impact scale, with only Endgame and Infinity War being higher. But it doesn’t really feel like that’s the case. There’s a vague tease that Deadpool will eventually become important; at one point Matthew Macfadyen’s Paradox shows Wade a clip of him dead in Thor’s arms and then handwaves it away. But Deadpool & Wolverine ends with Deadpool back home in his universe, and the only existing MCU characters he's interacted with are Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15 from Loki and Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan.
It’s a little confusing, candidly. On the one hand, I appreciate how standalone the film is, even with all the meta jokes. But the whole selling of this movie was the fact that Deadpool was supposed to be coming into the MCU. I guess the big conclusion is that Hugh Jackman is officially back in play; the movie ends with this new variant of Logan alive and well and living in Deadpool’s universe. That, combined with this brief tease about Deadpool’s future, likely tees them both up for a future appearance in Secret Wars.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if the movie formally known as The Kang Dynasty may now become a riff on the “Time Runs Out” arc from Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers. In that story, the Marvel heroes try and fail to stop various other universes from colliding and fusing with theirs, laying the foundation for Secret Wars. This new movie could play on that and have Deadpool and Wolverine’s universe threatened to be swallowed up by the main MCU, which would be a good reason to bring them back.
While we're on the subject of the MCU's future, ComicCon International starts this weekend. Do you have any predictions as to what kind of news we might see Marvel decide to break in San Diego? And what one thing—literally anything, a casting choice, a new project, anything—could they announce that would have you instantly putting all your money into Disney stock?
The last time Marvel was at Comic-Con was in 2022 when they announced Secret Wars at the start of this down period. Now, two years later, we’re kind of in the same boat. I think talk of the MCU’s demise is maybe a little overblown—as you mentioned, Deadpool & Wolverine is likely to make a pile of money. But creatively, they’re still wobbly, as evidenced by the reviews for Deadpool & Wolverine, which range from the their-best-since-Endgame hype to the suggestion that it should be “the last superhero movie ever made.”
That said, there’s an overwhelming sense of “What exactly are we doing here?” that I can’t help but feel right now. I think Marvel needs to walk out of Comic-Con having communicated very specific intentions about its future. We can’t be coy anymore. Are we actually doing this Multiverse stuff now? If so, where exactly can we anticipate seeing stories that will lead into that? Who is on this new Avengers team? Is Kang still a thing? How many of these disparate Disney+ shows will turn out to be actually important? Clarity is key, and that’s the biggest thing I want to see.
As far as lower-hanging fruit, we’re likely to get an official announcement about the Russos returning, alongside trailers for Thunderbolts, Daredevil: Born Again, Captain America: Brave New World, and maybe a costume test for Fantastic Four. I think the thing that would move the needle for me is this: Sam Raimi’s talked about enjoying his time on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and wanting to come back for Secret Wars. Since that one’s going to the Russos, what if Raimi does come back . . . but for the next Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland instead? That would certainly pique my interest.
