As a Millennial, we grew up in an age without the smartphones we have now. My first phone had an antenna, and I used it mainly to call and text. If we wanted music, we had Limewire, MTV, the radio and burned CDs that we made using Windows Media Player. We ended up watching so many movies mainly because that was one of our main sources of entertainment. My family would go to the cinema together nearly every week, and trips to the movies with my friends were always a part of our after-school outings.
I remember sneaking in for my first NC16 movie because my friend wasn’t old enough to watch it as she had a late birthday, and the numerous girly movie nights with movies like The Princess Diaries and Crossroads. My husband is the furthest thing from a cinephile, but he has watched the original X-Men movies, the two Fantastic Four movies, and of course the trilogy of Blade movies. Growing up with cable meant that I watched all of these movies multiple times, and continued to follow these franchises through reboots. I have years of knowledge of these characters, the movies and storylines, as well as iconic moments and lines of dialogue. Deadpool & Wolverine is counting on that knowledge and the fondness for these movies, which is why when we hear the line: “some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill”, of course the entire theatre would go crazy, because it means something to us.
It’s not only the cameos and memorable lines, the music in the movie speaks to us as well. That dance scene to N’Sync’s “Bye, Bye, Bye”, the fight scene in the Honda Odyssey scored to Grease’s “You’re the One That I Want”, the emo car scene set to Avril Lavigne’s “I’m With You”; there was even “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. If you go on YouTube and search up any of these songs, there’s someone in the comments saying that Deadpool & Wolverine brought them there. I spent so much of the movie just vibing to the music and more or less singing out loud when it came to Lavigne’s “I’m With You”. Music has the ability to make you feel things, but it can also remind you of the person you were when you first listened to these songs. I felt younger and older all at the same time.
Some may feel that Deadpool & Wolverine leveraged the same fan service and nostalgia that Spider-Man: No Way Home did, but the two are nowhere in the same league. No Way Home brought back previous Spider-Men and beloved characters from the previous movies, but they were shoehorned in and not quite a natural fit. The end result felt like dilutions of their previous characters and arcs. But it didn’t feel that way in Deadpool & Wolverine, maybe because of the metatextual nature of the film.
They acknowledge the absurdity of it as well as the blatant fan service, but given all the moving pieces that make up the movie, the people who worked on this grew up with these films as well. There’s a deep love here for these movies and characters. Yes, even the stinkers like X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That movie is Deadpool’s cinematic debut, and Ryan Reynolds was told that if he wanted to play the character, this is how he would be introduced. If he wasn’t happy, they would find someone else. We eventually got a Deadpool movie, a sequel, and now this third film because Reynolds had such a connection to the character and wanted to do the character’s big screen debut justice.
For the end credits of Deadpool & Wolverine, they edit together behind the scenes footage of all the Fox-era films, and we get to see a young Hugh Jackman prancing around as Wolverine, with Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” scoring the entire thing. It’s a jarring thing to see him so young, the contrast particularly emphasized because we just watched Jackman play the character again at 55. In turn, it reminds us of who we were when we watched these movies, listening to bands like Green Day, almost giddy with youthful idealism that our lives will be everything we want it to be. And now, years later, we’re older, jaded, and like both Deadpool and Wolverine, we’re holding on to past baggage that we cannot bear to set aside. Much like Deadpool does at the start of the film, we wonder if we’ve done anything to truly matter, or if our lives have just been a whole bunch of nothingness. Most of us are burnt out and exhausted, yet we continue to grind and hustle because we grew up with the mindset that we need to make something of ourselves or we mean nothing.
Deadpool & Wolverine was never intended to contribute significantly to the current or future phase of the MCU. Deadpool wanted to be an avenger because he thought that’s what it would take for him to matter, and over the course of the movie, he learned that maybe it’s okay to just be that wisecracking weirdo who has 9 people in the world who love him. Like Happy Hogan said, it’s okay to live a life where we just aim for the middle. Maybe we’ll be happier that way.
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