Given the critical and commercial disaster that was 2023, Marvel, and by extension Disney, really needed a win in 2024. While Pixar, which Disney also owns, has already achieved some much needed major success this year with Inside Out 2 – hauling in an astonishing $1.594 USD (so far) at the worldwide box office since its June 14th –some were still unsure if the Marvel branch could recapture the financial and creative successes of the pre-Endgame MCU with their sole release of 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine.
Well, we now have the answer, as this latest superhero outing is beloved by audiences and has been smashing records since its July 26th release, just this past weekend becoming only the second R-rated movie to cross the billion dollar mark at the global box office with few signs of it slowing down. Marvel, it appears, has returned to their bankable ways.
The first and only other film to make over a billion at the global box office is 2019’s Joker, which brought in $1.079 billion. However, that record is all but certain broken by Marvel’s foul-mouthed behemoth, which sits at $1.029 billion as of writing and is coming off its third consecutive week atop the U.S. box office, just barely edging out another success story, It Ends With Us, which, as it happens is produced by and starring Ryan Reynolds’ wife Blake Lively. This makes them the first married couple command in 34 years to take top two spots in the U.S. box office with their own movies, the last time being Bruce Willis’ Die Hard 2 in the top spot followed by Demi Moore’s Ghost.
Suffice to say, 2024 has been much better for moviegoing, which is a great sign for industry as a whole, particularly after a rocky 2023 and the actors’ and writers’ strikes to boot. It’s difficult to convey just how much of a runaway success Deadpool & Wolverine is and what it means to global box offices, and the lion’s share of praise goes to Reynolds, Jackman and everyone behind this movie’s making, but credit must also go to Keving Feige and Marvel for some very shrewd decision-making throughout the process.
The first major development was Marvel deciding to integrate Deadpool into the MCU following their acquisition of 20th Century Fox. While this might seem like a no-brainer, the MCU had been relatively family-friendly throughout its history, not to mention Disney normally does not like its brand being this closely associated with something as crass and violent as Deadpool & Wolverine. Yet, at the end of the day, money talks, and the successes of the previous Deadpool movies were too much to ignore, especially in light of the MCU’s recent struggles.
Of course, the single biggest moment in the process of making this movie was landing Hugh Jackman, who agreed to return yet again as the Wolverine despite retiring the character after James Mangold’s Logan in 2017. This vastly changed the complexion of the third entry in this beloved franchise, as there was now the promise of uniting two characters that rank amongst the most popular in the history of superhero cinema. While adding Shawn Levy as the director was another astute choice, as he has worked with both stars in the past and has a particularly strong working relationship with Reynolds, the director had, quite frankly, become secondary to the public after the announcement of Jackman’s return to his most iconic role.
Admittedly, Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t shake up the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the way I had hoped, but it did very much deliver one other thing that Marvel had been neglecting over the past few years: giving the audience what they want. While there have been notable highlights in the MCU’s post-Endgame era such as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and the embodiment of wish fulfilment that is Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel became more concerned with quantity over quality as time went on. This is why I also applaud their decision to roll back on the annual releases and focus on putting out one good, solid movie instead of three half-baked concoctions that nobody asked for.