Deadpool & Wolverine Is an Insult to the Fox Franchise

Warning: spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine appear in the following article.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a film that tries to accomplish a lot of things. It tries, and succeeds, at integrating Deadpool into the larger MCU. But if there’s one thing the movie fails at, it’s delivering a worthy farewell to Fox’s slate of Marvel movies. In fact, it’s a bit insulting.

From the second that the first trailer premiered and the movie presented reference after reference to 20th Century Fox and its X-Men franchise, it has been clear what Deadpool & Wolverine is trying to go for. It’s meant to be the definitive ending of that era of filmmaking — a last hurrah for a company that no longer exists. Nearly a quarter of a century of Marvel films from X-Men to Fantastic Four would be on full display in the movie. It’s all one gigantic metatextual knot to unravel that is, at points, clever. But, too often, Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t understand what made those movies so enjoyable and, at times, takes numerous cheap shots at them in an attempt to bolster the MCU’s decaying reputation.

Something that Deadpool & Wolverine (and many MCU fans) seems to forget, is that the Fox slate of Marvel movies wasn’t bad. Granted, there were plenty of underwhelming and terrible films — there ain’t nobody defending Fant4stic — but Deadpool & Wolverine seems to think that the only good Fox movie was Logan. And yeah, that movie is great, but it also ignores the fact that X-Men, X2, The Wolverine, X-Men: First Class, and X-Men: Days of Future Past were all solid movies in their own right. Even the first two Blade movies and Rise of the Silver Surfer were fun in their own ways.

Deadpool & Wolverine is selective in trying to paint a picture of what the Fox Marvel films were, but it’s not an accurate depiction. It ignores the fact that the X-Men franchise was beloved for its diverse cast, action setpieces, and social commentary. Instead, it only seems to think that the one thing people liked worth salvaging was Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.

Speaking of, Hugh Jackman’s presence in Deadpool & Wolverine never sat right with me. Getting Jackman to reprise his role was never about an artistic vision or paying their respects to the plethora of movies he played Logan in. It just feels like a cynical publicity stunt. Let’s not mince words here, interest in the MCU has been on a downward trend in recent years, something that Deadpool & Wolverine unwisely draws attention to. Whether it be critically divisive movies, disappointing box office performances, or an increasingly muddied direction, signing Hugh Jackman doesn’t feel like an homage. It feels like a desperate plot by Marvel to try and earn the goodwill of audiences again and ensure a box office hit.

If Marvel actually cared about Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, they wouldn’t have included him in the movie. The film deifies the Wolverine from Fox’s X-Men films to the point where characters cry in-movie about how wonderful and noble he was, but I would argue that Deadpool & Wolverine disrespects his legacy more than anything else. The film tries to have it both ways, painting Fox’s Logan as this truly heroic symbol but frequently belittles and patronizes the Wolverine present. The film makes abundantly clear that its Logan isn’t the same man from the beloved Fox movies, so what’s even the point of including him? Why not just cook up some retcon to make this Logan the same character as the one we watched in the 2000s and 2010s?

And don’t say it’s because they didn’t want to disrespect the ending of Logan. Deadpool & Wolverine may pretend to care about the importance of that film, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. After all, the first scene of Deadpool & Wolverine features Deadpool literally digging up Logan’s corpse and using it as a prop for a gratuitous action scene. When I watched this scene, I wasn’t thinking about all of the gory killing that Deadpool was doing while Bye Bye Bye blares in the background. I was thinking about how this is now the ending of the Wolverine who sacrificed everything to save X-23 from becoming a weapon just like he was. His story no longer ends with him saving Laura and dying a hero. His story now ends with Deadpool using his claws to skewer a guy’s nuts.

“Endings” is also one of the main themes that tie together most of the returning Fox Marvel characters. I love the concept that The Void is a graveyard for 20th Century Fox, made all the more apparent by their logo buried in sand once Deadpool arrives there. These are characters who will never be able to continue their stories, so seeing people like Wesley Snipes’ Blade, Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, and even Chris Evans’ Johnny Storm talk about how they want an actual ending is fitting, at points. They don’t want to fade into obscurity but rather go out on their own terms. But then you realize that, once again, Deadpool & Wolverine is twisting the actual story to fit the one it wants to tell.

Because those characters did have endings: Blade defeated Dracula in Blade: Trinity and saved the day. Elektra saved Abby in her movie, mirroring Wolverine’s actions in Logan. Johnny helped save the day in Rise of the Silver Surfer by defeating Galactus and Dr. Doom. They had their endings, and they, for the most part, had good ones. The only character that can justifiably say that they never got the ending they deserved was Channing Tatum’s Gambit. His film was never produced, so his desire to actually have an ending is believable. He never got a chance to exist, but instead of actually doing something with it, it just becomes a throwaway line as the film becomes more focused on poking fun at how bad a Channing Tatum-led Gambit movie would be. That doesn’t come across as a cute reference. That feels like kicking a dead horse.

But okay — let’s give the movie the benefit of the doubt and say that these characters didn’t get the endings that they deserved. Let’s ignore all of the other characters that pop up, like Lady Deathstrike, Pyro, and Sabretooth, and how they get no resolution whatsoever, and let’s instead look at the ending that each of these characters actually received in Deadpool & Wolverine:

Johnny Storm dies for a joke and, thanks to the post-credits scene, comes across pretty poorly. As for Blade, Elektra, and Gambit, despite wanting to get out of the Void, they’re stuck there. We don’t see them leave; we just watch them stay in Cassandra’s base as the giant purple CGI time-eating monster floats around, leaving their fates open to interpretation. Because we never see these characters again, I would argue that their endings are now even worse — we don’t know whether they were killed by the ugly CGI monster, got out of The Void, or are still wandering around with no way out. How is that a more definitive and conclusive ending than the ones they got in their movies?

Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t seem to understand that actions have consequences. It tries to poke fun at a library of films that people genuinely liked and, more often than not, were successful at the box office. Yes, there were duds, but Deadpool & Wolverine seems to think that Logan is the only film worth respecting. Even then, it completely dishonors the legacy of that film by using its conclusion as a setup for an action scene that pisses on the memory of the only person Deadpool & Wolverine seems to care about. Hugh Jackman is here, but it’s performative fanservice that comes across as a desperate plea for people to say that “Marvel is back.” Even the surprise cameos that the film is banking on wrongly assume that these characters never got the justice they deserved.

After watching Deadpool & Wolverine, I immediately started to think about Spider-Man: No Way Home. That film attempted to do a similar thing with Sony’s slate of Spider-Man films, but No Way Home succeeded because it respected each of the characters it brought back. It remembered that these were actual characters and gave them arcs and scenes that respected their past appearances, even building upon them. In Deadpool & Wolverine, the characters they brought back and the references they make come across as cheap fanservice that totally ignores why people liked those films in the first place. No, playing Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) over some behind-the-scenes footage of 20th Century Fox films isn’t honoring the company’s legacy. It’s a reminder of how Disney aggressively bought out 20th Century Fox so it could have more IP, get Marvel’s toys back, and try to make a pop-culture monopoly.