Deadpool And Wolverine Better Not Make Us All Care About The MCU Again

This last year has been relaxing. I've caught the movies that I wanted to, watched the TV shows that I wanted to, and not spent any time thinking about the lore ramifications of obscure characters in post-credits cameos. I've avoided checking calendars to see when the next Marvel limited series is set to release and dodged wasting my mornings catching up on episodes from the night before. Not having to care about the MCU has been freeing, and I'm gonna be really annoyed if this year’s Deadpool & 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wolverine forces us all to get invested again.

The Superhero Crash Begins

In 2023, the superhero genre took a tumble. The Flash bombed. The Marvels bombed. Shazam! Fury of the Gods bombed. Blue Beetle bombed. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania bombed slightly less hard than the rest, but still bombed. As someone who has wanted to see original stories reclaim their place on the big screen, it's been a breath of fresh air to see films like Anyone But You, The Iron Claw, Monkey Man, Immaculate, and The Beekeeper make double or triple their budgets back (and in the case of Anyone But You, significantly more) while superhero movies flopped. Civil War ruling the roost for two weekends in a row was similarly encouraging. These movies aren't raking in the kind of cash that an IP blockbuster can when it really breaks out, but they also can't lose the kind of money those significantly more expensive films can.

Th🐬e MCU Has🥂 One Joke, And It’s Getting Exhausting

"Oh, we're using the made-up names."

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: ꦆ 𝐆

There are all sorts of reasons that Hollywood should be focusing ꦆon smaller and/or original movies, and I want to encourage it to do so by voting with my dollar. I saw all those movies I mentioned in theaters and skipped all those superhero movies during their theatrical runs.

The Return Of The MCU?

Deadpool & Wolverine is shaping up to be a big hit, though I doubt it will surpass the first two movies, and audiences turning out for two well-known characters doesn't mean that superheroes as a whole still print money. Spider-Man will always do well, Batman will always do well, and if you put an iconic character like Deadpool next to the most recognizable member of the X-Men, that will probably do well, too. It's definitely the most interested I've been in anything MCU-related since Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, but that isn't saying much given that The Marvels, Loki season two, and Echo are all we've had in the interim.

Though I'm somewhat interested in seeing the movie, I'm uninterested in seeing the defibrillation of the media ecosystem that surrounds movies like this. After the most recent hit the internet, I started to see those familiar articles pop up on many of the websites I read: articles explaining the Easter eggs (like the reference to Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld), references to visuals drawn from other MCU movies (like the giant Ant-Man helmet repurposed as a base), and analysis of the elements the movie might be drawing from the comics. This is the world that we lived in for the past 15 years, and it took 2023's pause in Marvel world domination to fully internalize just how constant the demand to care about this stuff had become if you wanted to know what people were talking about.

I have my gripes with the movies themselves, sure, but I've enjoyed plenty of superhero films since I first saw X-Men and Spider-Man in the Y2K era. In fact, Deadpool & Wolverine has clarified that what I'm really tired of is pop culture revolving around superheroes. Barbenheimer was refreshing because the movies spawned a ton of discussion and very little of it had to do with examining the source material like a crime scene. There were debates about the merits of Barbie's feminism and whether Oppenheimer should have shown the effect of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were plenty of Easter eggs to spot in Barbie, and plenty of discussions to be had about Oppenheimer's adaptation of its source material. But, the overall tenor of the conversation was more substantive, more focused on themes.

It felt downright adult. After that, I'm dreading the conversations that Deadpool & Wolverine will inspire, conversations about where the MCU is headed next, what specific comics the story is drawing from, and from what universe each cameo character hails. Caring about comic books isn't childish., but it feels like the conversation around these movies can only go as deep as Wolverine's baby claws in the most recent trailer.