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Most recently, Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed Barbie, last year’s highest-grossing film, to take #12 on the list of all-time highest-grossing blockbusters at the domestic box office. It has taken less than 90 days for the movie to rack up $636 million in North America and more than $1.3 billion worldwide.
The foul-mouthed buddy comedy brought back Hugh Jackman for his last “one last ride” as Wolverine — unless there’s a sequel! — and reunited him with Ryan Reynolds, who admitted that after Disney acquired Fox, he wasn’t sure whether he would ever get to make a third Deadpool film. The movie was directed by Stranger Things and Free Guy veteran Shawn Levy.
You can see the TV spot below.
The movie has been a breath of fresh air after a few rocky years for Marvel Studios in particular and superhero movies more broadly. With few exceptions, most comics adaptations have been performing like like Madame Web and Joker: Folie a Deux than Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 and Deadpool & Wolverine. The box office as a whole has been struggling, with a number of reliable tentpole franchises starting to show their age. Besides the stumbling Marvel monolith, series like Mission: Impossible and Transformers have had some pretty high-profile disappointments in the years since Hollywood’s brief, pandemic-related shutdown.
Deadpool & Wolverine, like Guardians, also managed to draw rave reviews from critics, lending some credibility to James Gunn’s long-held philosophy that people aren’t tired of superhero movies — they’re tired of lazy, uninspired superhero movies, and if you make a good one, they’ll show up for it.
“People say ‘superhero fatigue,’ but I think that you see now that’s not a real thing,” Gunn said shortly after he was tapped to take over DC Studios. “People are fatigued with repetition. I don’t think it’s just superhero movies; I think you’re seeing it now in spectacle films in general…there’s a lot of spectacle films made, and they just have gotten really generic and they’ve gotten boring, and they’re not about characters, and there’s no emotion.”
