As Deadpool & Wolverine is about to hit $1bn at the global box office this weekend, the question Disney suits will no doubt be asking themselves is whether there’s more wonga to be made here. Just about everybody expected Ryan Reynolds’s debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be a success, but few could have imagined that Shawn Levy’s film would look set to overtake Todd Phillips’s Joker as the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time in only its third week of release. This one is going to run and run.
All eyes will now turn to what happens next, because the whole point of the MCU is that there is ALWAYS something coming next. Where once Hollywood was dependent on sequels, prequels, spin-offs and reboots to keep the gravy train rolling when it finally had a big hit on its hands, it now boasts a seemingly endless saga that acts more like an ever-expanding, constantly evolving fanboy joy virus. Which is why the screams coming from Mouse House HQ this week must have been more palpable than the tortured yelps of those destined to spend eternity in Dante’s Inferno when Reynolds was quoted as saying that he had precisely zero plans for a follow-up.
Describing Deadpool & Wolverine as a movie “made as a complete experience”, Reynolds told Collider: “It wasn’t meant to be a commercial for another movie. It wasn’t meant to be any of that stuff. And I think I get a great deal of joy making a movie like that. But honestly, right in this moment, I have no idea if I’ll ever wear that Deadpool suit again – I hope I do – but I don’t know. Right now’s the time to just kind of hang it up for a bit and see what happens next.”
The reality here, of course, is that there’s less chance of Marvel diversifying into documentaries about the life cycle of the east African hairy aardvark than there is of the studio never making another Deadpool movie starring Reynolds. MCU episodes are always adverts for its next 10 films, and it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend that the Canadian actor wasn’t fully aware of this when he signed on the dotted line.
On the other hand, Reynolds has so fulsomely flagged up the image of Deadpool & Wolverine as a monolithic, once-in-a-lifetime event picture that it’s hardly surprising he’s steering away (publicly at least) from the idea of another go-round. The chances of Jackman returning seem remote – there are only so many times the merc with a mouth and his grumpy adamantium-clawed buddy can slash each other to bits while trading kindergarten-level personal insults before everyone starts wondering if maybe Eternals-era Marvel wasn’t so terrible after all.
Deadpool & Wolverine has done so well that the studio will be desperate to find a way to involve Reynolds (and potentially Jackman) in its upcoming Avengers movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars. Levy has spoken in the past about wanting to make a Deadpool & Spider-Man movie, which hints at a way forward for the saga. Yet surely our potty-mouthed mutant wants to become more than the MCU’s eternal meta-troll, rolling out a series of encounters with various Marvel straight men until there’s nobody left for him to go up against and they end up sticking him in the Void to trade insults with a dozen even more sarcastic, alternative-reality Varia-pools.
The problem, perhaps, for Deadpool in the MCU, is that he doesn’t really belong here at all. The more he appears, the less likely it is – on a number of levels – that anyone’s going to take any other Marvel movie that doesn’t star Reynolds seriously. The more we see him bounding on to the screen in glorious, ultraviolent, super-sweary larger-than-life Imax, the greyer, smaller and more boring everyone around him looks. And yet now that the studio has seen how much audiences love him, it’s hard to imagine its film-makers not doing everything they can to repeat the trick, as soon as is humanly possible.
Perhaps it really is better for everyone involved if Reynolds – as he has been suggesting – just stays on Earth-10005 for at least a little while longer, until Kevin Feige and his team can work out what to actually do with him. And yet you get the feeling this is one loudmouthed, jagged-edged, hyper-irreverent Pandora’s box that’s never going to quite shut properly, ever again.