If there’s one film franchise that I have an irrational amount of affection for, it’s probably 20th Century Fox’s X-Men. Most of that is a product of boyhood nostalgia – I was in sixth grade when X-Men: The Last Stand came out in 2006, and it was the first film whose release date (May 26) I had memorized and eagerly counted down the days towards. I recognize now that The Last Stand is not a particularly good movie, and in fact that most movies in the franchise aren’t all that great, but I was 11-years-old at the time, so the overall quality of the film was secondary. As an adult, I can look back at my affection for the X-Men films and recognize many of things that appealed to preteen me about them on a subconscious level – the promise of hidden potential and acceptance into a non-mainstream community, the gruff but affectionate masculinity of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and a sense of then-illicit feeling sexuality that’s been absent from most superhero movies before or since – but the most base level of appeal was that, given the size of both the titular team and their adversaries in the Brotherhood of Mutants, there was a seemingly infinite number of characters for these movies to draw on. I didn’t care about the plot that centered on a “cure” for mutants, but I did care that I finally got to see the likes of Angel, Juggernaut, and Psylocke on the big screen for the first time. What they did once they got there was only so important to me, which is exactly the reason why they don’t let 11-year-old boys make multimillion dollar franchise films. 

Unfortunately, this preadolescent urge to organize one’s action figure and proceed to do very little with them seems to be one of the guiding philosophies behind Deadpool & Wolverine, the third film in the X-Men-adjacent Ryan Reynolds-headlined series, and presumably the last film to feature Jackman as the world’s most famous mutant. What’s more, the people who made Deadpool & Wolverine seem to view it as an opportunity to pay half-hearted tribute to the Marvel-licensed films made (and in one case, not made) by Fox in the early 2000s, an incredibly inside baseball effort that sacrifices some of the slapstick humor of the first two Deadpool films in favor of winking references and ingratiating fan service. It’s not a wholly unentertaining movie, but its implications for the future of superhero films are grim and discouraging. 

The first strike against Deadpool & Wolverine is the level of “required reading” needed to fully understand the plot, which draws not only from the prior two films and the rest of the X-universe, but also the Loki Disney+ series and the real world implications of Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox, which which was completed back in 2019. Resigned to leading a civilian life as a car salesman after failing to be accepted as an Avenger, It’s never fully explained how Deadpool, who ostensibly inhabits Earth-TRN414, lands a job interview with Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) of Earth-616, but whatever. Deadpool jumps at the chance to help Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), a renegade member of the Time Variance Authority, the sort of Cosmic New Deal-style agency responsible for managing the fabric of reality in Loki. Paradox tells Deadpool that his timeline is in danger of disintegrating because of the death of Wolverine, his timeline’s “anchor being,” Never mind that the film that features Wolverine’s death is Logan, takes place in 2029, well after the X-Men are no longer a going concern and presumably takes place after the events of Deadpool’s life in Deadpool & Wolverine, but, again, whatever. and that he plans to use a “time ripper” to “mercy kill” the timeline before it dies on its own accord. Deadpool assumes that this means he can save his reality by replacing his Wolverine, stealing Paradox’s temp pad and hopping across realities until he finds a particularly drunk and depressed version of the adamantium-boned Canadian and brings him back to Paradox, who responds by sending them to the Void, home to other beings who have been “pruned” out of reality by the TVA. 

In Loki, the Void is home to alternate versions of the title character, but in Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s apparently where the lower level villains of past X-Men films, like Sabretooth (Tyler Mane) and Pyro (Aaron Stanford) live and work for Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), Charles Xavier’s evil twin (it’s a long story) who’s fashioned herself as a kind of Immortan Joe of this interdimensional wasteland and somehow protects her acolytes from Alioth, the big-cloud monster type thing introduced, as Deadpool helpfully reminds us “in Loki season 1, episode 5.” Opposing Nova’s rule is a ragtag group of other Marvel/Fox characters, including Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes), X-23 (Dafne Keene) and – in a joke I saw coming a mile away – Chris Evans’ Human Torch, who Deadpool initially mistakes for Captain America (they’re played by the same actor, you see). Also, Channing Tatum shows up as Gambit, a role he never actually got to play when the character’s stand alone film, which he was attached to, got stuck in development hell before ultimately being canceled. 

This gathering of IP castoffs is reminiscent of the Illuminati scene in Doctor Strange in the MultiVerse of Madness, in which Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Anson Mount’s Black Bolt, and John Krasinki’s Mr. Fantastic all appeared in an alternate reality visited by the Sorcerer Supreme. But whereas director Sam Raimi’s decision to have the Scarlet Witch grotesquely murder each of those characters felt like a bit of a jab at cameo hungry audiences, Deadpool & Wolverine treats the cameoed characters in his films with a sense of… not quiet reverence, but earnestness that feels both unnecessary and unwanted. Put it this way: outside of X-23, who provides Wolverine with the motivation to help Deadpool get back to his reality, I’m actually incredibly unsure what we as the audience are meant to feel when these characters enter the screen. Are we supposed to feel satisfied that we recognize a version of Elektra from two movies no one cares about and Gambit from a movie that was never made? Are we supposed to feel appreciative to the Disney corporation that they allowed us to say goodbye to these characters? When Wesley Snipes says “there’ll only ever be one Blade,” are we supposed to be laughing with Marvel or laughing at their bizarre inability to make a good movie about a cool vampire hunter played by Mahershala Ali? What exactly is going on here?

I wouldn’t be so hung up on this aspect of the film if its attitudes to the Fox movies weren’t A) so muddled and B) framed as the centerpiece of the movie. During the film’s credits, we’re treated to a montage of behind the scenes moments from Fox’s Marvel movies set, in an unbelievable cliche, to Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” It’s overly sentimental, oddly reverent, and completely unnecessary. Did someone at Marvel think that audiences wouldn’t be able to accept previously Fox-licensed characters appearing in the MCU unless they were given a sense of closure beforehand? It’s not like this was a beloved, coherent universe – outside of the first two Blade films and maybe half of the X-Men franchise, these movies are generally considered to be quite bad. Anyone who would’ve felt uncomfortable buying a ticket to the upcoming MCU Fantastic Four film because they felt like 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer wasn’t a satisfying enough conclusion to Tim Story’s interpretation of the characters should probably deal with their personal psychological problems before they tackle the larger issue of media consolidation. 

All of this wouldn’t bother me so much if it didn’t feel so patronizing, and if it didn’t come with a whiff of an MCU-superiority complex. The plot of this film treats the death of Wolverine in Logan as the literal end of the world, something that Deadpool has to essentially reverse lest all of his loved ones be erased forever. It’s hard not to read that as Kevin Feige chiding his Fox counterparts for letting the most important character on their roster die, and for letting their biggest star walk away from the franchise he helped build. It frames the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated movie as a mistake, a destabilizing event that made the studio worthless afterwards. It’s a condescending, misguided interpretation that speaks more to the MCU’s creative doldrums than its power as a media franchise. Logan is not a perfect movie, but it does what no other film in the MCU has tried to do – stand on its own, not just as a comic book adaptation, but as an entry in the American film canon. I don’t think it succeeds in everything it tries to accomplish, but at the very least it acts as a touching send off to a character that meant a lot to me, letting him rest in a way that few comic book characters never have the opportunity to do. It left me wanting more in the sense that I love watching Jackman play Wolverine, but also left me secure knowing that he had done all he could do in that role. 

But, no, apparently some exec at Disney thought what I really needed was for Jackman to be dragged back to set so I could finally see him don the yellow costume he never actually wore in the Fox days. I’d like to think that the opening action sequence, in which Deadpool brutalizes a group of TVA agents with Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton, is an acknowledgement of the blunt, almost shameless way that Marvel is dragging the character and actor back from the dead. But even if it is, the recent casting of Robert Downey Jr., who essentially inaugurated the MCU as Iron Man, as the villainous Dr. Doom, makes me think Feige and company didn’t get the joke.

All of this is not to say that Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t entertaining or even isn’t worth seeing. It’s enjoyable enough. But it’s also an incredibly strange and confusing document, a multi-million dollar film built around jokes about a corporate acquisition that took place five years ago, and that wants to convince you that the group of Fox films whose average Rotten Tomatoes score probably hovers around 54% are worth mourning. I’m sure there are plenty of people who wanted another Deadpool movie and another Wolverine movie – but I do wonder how many of them wanted the movie that looks like this. Then again, this is a film that went on to have the sixth-largest (non-inflation-adjusted) opening weekend of all-time – so maybe there are more people who view the world like an 11-year old than I realized.