'Deadpool & Wolverine': Ryan Reynolds Wants Satisfied Customers
The latest Marvel movie shows the friction between selling a product and telling a story.
Last year, I remarked on how Ryan Reynolds had left dramatically challenging roles behind because he was more interested in perfecting the Ryan Reynolds “brand.” He quit making artsy movies with limited audience appeal to lean heavily into crowdpleasing comedies. Given the lattitude provided by the success of 2016’s Deadpool, a movie where Reynolds bet heavily on himself and his own intuition that audiences would show up for an R-rated superhero movie about a character who constantly breaks the fourth wall (not a sure thing at the time by any means), Reynolds saw the rewards of trusting his skills not only as a comic actor, but as a writer and producer.
He made something that people liked, and decided to lean even more into selling products. In 2018 he purchased a stake in Aviation Gin and in 2019 he purchased a stake in Mint Mobile. Rather than remain a silent investor, Reynolds took an active role in crafting the marketing for these products, making himself not only a pitchman, but a creative force like when Aviation was able to swiftly respond to a bad Peloton ad. This kind of wry, self-referential humor has become Reynolds stock-in-trade, and it’s in service of sales. But how does that translate to a movie rather than something you could buy in a store?
The answer looks a lot like Deadpool & Wolverine where Reynolds’ penchant for brand awareness collides with Marvel, one of the biggest brands on the planet. The whole hook here is that Deadpool, who was previously siloed off in Marvel movies made by 20th Century Fox, could now play in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Disney bought Fox in 2019. There was the question of whether family-friendly Disney would allow an R-rated character like Deadpool in their playground, but the lucrative prospects of teaming “The Merc with a Mouth” with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine again (after it looked like he put away his claws in 2017’s Logan) were too much for the studio to turn down.
I don’t know how Deadpool & Wolverine will perform this weekend (although I suspect it will have an easier go than The Marvels), but from a creative standpoint, it’s fascinating to watch Reynolds try to thread the need of a brand exercise while claiming irreverance every step of the way. It’s a movie that piles on the fan service so thick that I imagine people who don’t constantly follow superhero movie news will start getting confused. But it’s also a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too, pointing out the ridiculousness of comics and superhero movies while also doing everything in its power to reference and celerbate the genre.
There can be something endearing about the attitude of, “This is so stupid and I love it,” but in Deadpool & Wolverine, you can get whiplash moving from reverence to irreverence just as the previous Deadpool movies relish their outlandish jokes while still aiming for mawkish sentiment. On paper, the approach makes sense: we can get wild with the humor as long as we have an emotional core. In practice, you constantly feel the movie stopping dead in its tracks so it can create a semblance of a character arc and plot. The goal is to have a wise-cracks with a big heart, but the experience is like jumping between two different movies.
With that kind of dissonance, you start to see that the storytelling doesn’t matter as much as hitting particular moments regardless of how well they fit together. If you need Deadpool to do something hilariously violent, you have him do it. If you need Wolverine to have a big emotional moment, you have him do it. The connective tissue doesn’t matter as much because you’re more focused on making the moment land rather than how it lives alongside the rest of the movie.
The sense of Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t about telling a captivating story as much as it feels like a brand rewarding its viewers with more of the brand. Like when you see a good ad for a product you already own and you feel more satisfied with your purchase, Deadpool & Wolverine is there to pat every comic nerd on the head for sticking through all the superhero movies, both good and bad, that have emerged since 1998 when Blade showed there was a market beyond Batman movies. It’s there to wink and nod at those who hop between fan sites devouring the latest superhero movie news, applauding them as savvy consumers of the product who know not only the stories and characters, but the business of bringing them to the screen. Again, none of this is storytelling or has any thematic weight; it’s a brand appreciation exercise where the brand expresses its adoration for the fans and the fans express it back to the brand.
Ironically, while Reynolds is a successful businessman, Deadpool & Wolverine may be arriving at exactly the wrong time. The superhero movie is on the decline, and last weekend saw Twisters blow past box office expectations because it’s such an easy blockbuster for the layperson to appreciate. Compare that to Deadpool & Wolverine where you’ll need to remember the mid-credits scene of Deadpool 2, the current state of the MCU post-Loki: Season 2, as well as a deep well of superhero movie knowledge for all the cameos to make sense. Reynolds knows his audience, but his audience may no longer be big enough to really make this movie a splash, or at least give it any kind of permanence.
This is the big problem with fan-service-as-narrative: if you treat your audience solely as consumers, then you have nothing after they consume the product. You can only make the surprise cameo surprising once. You can only make the shocking joke shock the audience once. Reynolds may know how to make a distinctive product (although at this point, a Marvel movie with fan-service isn’t exactly novel), but the bigger challenge is in making something that lasts. I won’t deny that throughout Deadpool & Wolverine I was laughing my head off, and I am happy for Reynolds that after busts like Blade: Trinity and Green Lantern, he found a superhero character that works for him. However, as the credits rolled, I felt like I had eaten too much candy. The sugar high wore off and now I was left with a low, dull headache. But for the salesman like Reynolds, you can never have too much of a good thing as long as he’s the one selling it to you.
But hey, it has the sixth highest opening weekend.