OVERVIEW
Wade Wilson is back, and this time he has dragged a reluctant Wolverine from another universe with him. Deadpool & Wolverine sends the two through the TVA’s multiverse machinery into a wasteland of forgotten Marvel heroes, chased by a bureaucrat who sees stopping them as his shot at a promotion. Directed by Shawn Levy and co-written with Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells, it is the 34th MCU film and the first with an R rating. Reynolds returns alongside Hugh Jackman, with Emma Corrin and Matthew Macfadyen as the villains. Think Spider-Man: No Way Home but with Fox-era Marvel IP and considerably less plot.
BACKGROUND
The first two Deadpool films were Fox productions made on modest budgets, and their best jokes came from that constraint. The Deadpool 2 gag about the X-Mansion being nearly empty because the studio could not afford more mutants is funnier knowing it was true. Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019 ended all of that. By 2024, the film had $200 million in production budget and another $100 million in marketing, enough to buy back Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Chris Evans, and a convention floor’s worth of Fox-era cameos.
Marvel needed it badly. 2023 had been historically bad for the MCU, with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels both flopping. A studio that had not released an R-rated film since the 1990s was now betting its franchise’s recovery on the merc with a mouth. The film grossed $1.33 billion worldwide, broke the record for the biggest R-rated opening in history, and made Disney $400 million in profit. The audience showed up. The film did not quite meet them there.
THE REVIEW
The original Deadpool took years of sweat, a leaked test reel, and a tight budget to get made. It worked because Reynolds committed to it harder than anyone had to a comic book character in years, and because having no money forced the film to be clever. This one has $200 million and nothing to say with it. NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” Channing Tatum as Gambit for five minutes, a Deadpool dog: the kind of stuff that gets shared on Twitter before anyone has seen the film, and forgotten a week after.
The plot is an excuse, and the film knows it. Deadpool’s universe is dying, the TVA wants to let it, he recruits a Wolverine who would rather be left alone. When the two are just talking in the wasteland, without anything happening, the film gets close to something. Reynolds does what Reynolds does. There is real chemistry there. But Jackman looks like he would rather be elsewhere. After Logan, being pulled back for something this thin seems to cost him on screen and you can see it. The film reaches for emotional weight, repeatedly, and gets nothing back.
Levy directed Free Guy, which was unexpectedly good, so the drop here is real. He shoots entirely in the anonymous MCU house style: stagey sets, a wasteland with nothing interesting to look at, editing that cuts jokes before they land. The action has no tension because both characters instantly heal. Every fight is just an extended stabbing match between two people who cannot die, which means there is no reason to watch any of it. Reynolds keeps showing up regardless, and the mask helps because stunt performers carry a lot of the physical energy, but there is a ceiling to what he can do alone.
The villains are the one area that works. Macfadyen plays the TVA bureaucrat as Tom Wambsgans relocated from Succession to a government desk job, and it fits. Emma Corrin is the best thing in the film by a distance. Shaved head, a genuine unsettling quality the rest of the cast never touches. One VFX shot where her fingers push under a character’s skin and emerge through their face is the most convincing thing in the whole film. The choral arrangement of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” over the climax also earns its place, the one moment where the film actually lands what it keeps going for.
Mangold ended Wolverine with a sacrifice that felt final. Bringing him back, even under multiverse cover, says something the MCU would rather not say out loud: that none of it matters, that no one ever really stays dead, that the endings are just pauses. The yellow suit has a thin justification the movie does not believe either. Jackman wears it. That is about all the film gives him to do.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Deadpool & Wolverine made $1.33 billion and dragged Marvel out of its worst run in years. Disney got what it needed from this film. Whether the film itself is any good is a question the box office does not answer, and the movie seems to know that going in. It is not trying to be good. It is trying to be an event, and an event is what it became. The rest is details.