The stunning success of the giggly, extremely violent, and incredibly foul-mouthed comic book movie Deadpool—it earned $152 million in a single weekend when its studio expected half that—is nothing less than a pivot point in the history of popular culture. It marks the moment when the Hollywood motion-picture business has finally ceased being the “dream factory” of cliché and has, instead, become a group of vertically integrated conglomerates in the manner of boomtown Detroit—with The Walt Disney Company, the most successful and most corporate of them all, playing the role of General Motors.
Deadpool was an experiment for Marvel, the comic book movie line now owned and run by Disney. For one thing, as the first-person narrator tells us, its superhero is no hero. He’s a wisecracking enforcer-for-hire. He meets the girl of his dreams, a tough broad who works at a strip club, and they have rough sex and charming banter straight out of a public-access TV porn show of the 1970s—until he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Seduced by the promise of an unorthodox cure, he finds himself in a torture chamber run by a maniac who believes extreme pain will force people to mutate and develop special powers.
He does mutate and turns into Deadpool, an invulnerable killing machine whose only flaw is that he looks like a mummy after the bandages have been taken off. He won’t go back to his girlfriend because he’s so hideous, so he spends the rest of the movie killing people in order to find his tormentor and do him in as well.
Deadpool doesn’t help anyone, he doesn’t do right by anyone, and he doesn’t care about anyone. But he’s funny in a fast-talking guest-of-Howard-Stern sort of way, and he’s played by Ryan Reynolds, the extremely likable and very good-looking light comedian who has been flirting with superstardom for 15 years now and has finally secured his breakout part.
Audiences flocked to Deadpool because it was both something familiar and something new—a Marvel comic book movie that’s flat-out filthy. The defining quality of the Marvel superhero pictures is that they are all comedies at heart (the DC comic book movies, the Batmans and Supermans, are all Westerns at heart). Thus, Iron Man was a 1930s screwball comedy in superhero form. Deadpool is the superhero Porky’s.
It’s a movie you can’t take your 9-year-old to see, and that’s the point. The notion of making a superhero picture children cannot see was the experimental aspect of Deadpool in a commercial sense. The reason these movies have taken over Hollywood is that they appeal to “four quadrants”—men and women, and people both over and under 25—and by limiting Deadpool‘s audience by age, Marvel cut those four quadrants down to three-and-a-half. What it would lose in market share it could only gain in the intensity of interest on the part of its narrower audience. And it did.
The bet paid off, but the meaning of the payoff goes far beyond this one picture. Deadpool suggests that Marvel is now going to be able to make all kinds of different movies for its enormous fan base as they grow up and shift their focus and broaden their interests. The worst possible thing would be for these pictures to seem as though they are more for little kids than for tattooed teens and parent-basement-dwelling postcollegians. Marvel cannot afford to be uncool. Deadpool makes it, or keeps it, cool.
One can no longer look at the Marvel movies as individual pictures; and indeed, Disney doesn’t. The studio got into a huge fight with the fan-beloved writer-director Joss Whedon when he was making Avengers 2: The Rise of Ultron because it insisted Whedon insert characters and plot points that would be of use to Marvel in Avenger-related movies not yet made (or even written). He didn’t want to mess up his plotlines, but messed-up they got, because no matter how much money Whedon made for them with the first Avengers, Disney/Marvel is looking down the line.
The line is terrifying. It has 15 Marvel pictures lined up through the end of this decade. And in its second major product line, the Star Wars franchise, Disney has 5. One can imagine a similar experiment with Star Wars: something hyperviolent, maybe, or even a full-scale romantic melodrama that’s light on the action—Nicholas Sparks in a galaxy far, far away. This is a new way of thinking about and making movies. Who knows? Given how lousy the past 15 years of mainstream Hollywood releases have been, maybe the change will do us good.
Probably not, though.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
Editor’s Note: While Deadpool is a Marvel comic, the movie was made by Fox, not by Disney. The information the movie provides about the possibility of reaching wider audiences with R-rated superhero fare, however, applies in general throughout the industry.
