For the past few years, the MCU's biggest successes have come from playing the hits, and this weekend was no exception. Disney ruled the roost at the box office with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Deadpool & Wolverine's massive $438.3 million global debut, the best ever for an R-rated movie. Simultaneously, at San Diego Comic Con, Marvel announced that Robert Downey Jr. would be playing the villain in the upcoming Avengers movies, returnin🙈g to the MCU fold as Doctor Doom.
Remember Wolverine? Remember RDJ?
This is in keeping with the "Hey, remember this?" trend that the franchise kicked into high gear with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: No Way Home. That movie was a massive success because it brought together three generations of Spider-Men (and their rogues’ galleries of villains), activating the nostalgia of comic movie fans from Gen X down to Gen Alpha. Regardless of whether you loved the Tobey Maguire movies, grew up with the Andrew Garfield versions, or if Tom Holland was your introduction to the character, there was something to get excited about. I don't think it's a great movie, but even I'm not immune to the charms of all three Spideys teaming up.
This strategy doesn't always work. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Flash was a massive�🔯� bomb for Warner Bros. despite featuring the return of Michael Keaton's Batman, and cameos by George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Nicolas Cage as Superman. If you're keeping track, that's the grotesquely puppeteered likenesses of two dead men and one guy who never played the character.
That's the key appeal of Deadpool & Wolverine, too. Hugh Jackman, who comic book audiences bid farewell to with 2017's Logan, is back in the iconic role that made him famous, finally wearing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wolverine's comic-accurate yellow-and-blue spandex. It had been almost as long since moviegoers had seen Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool, who hadn't appeared in a film since 2018 due to the Disney/Fox merger. Pairing two well-liked characters, who the audience has nostalgia for, in a movie with cameos from a ton of other legacy characters is not especially creative or forward-thinking, but it definitely gets butts into theater seats.
Marvel is making the same bet with Downey. Five years after Iron Man’s death provided the big emotional beat for the climax of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avengers: Endgame and the Infinity Saga as a whole, Downey is headed back to the MCU as Victor von Doom which means that, in this version of his story, Doom will probably be a To😼ny Stark variant. If you paid much attention to Downey’s time on the Oscar campaign trail for Oppenheimer, this seems like a strange decision. Though he’s often expressed gratitude to Marvel for giving him the role that facilitated his comeback, the subtext always seemed to be that Christopher Nolan had given him another comeback, a chance to really act again after over a decade in franchise world. Now, with his first ever Oscar firmly on the mantle, he’s just… going back.
Return To The MCU's Past? Or Plot A New Course?
It’s a pretty uninteresting direction for Downey's career to take, after a pair of cool projects in Oppenheimer and HBO’s The Sympathizer series from revered Korean auteur Park Chan-wook. He’s just gonna go do more Avengers movies now? It feels similarly creatively bankrupt for Marvel. In the same way adding Wolverine’s name to the title of Deadpool 3 felt like the company’s attempt to make sure no one would make the mistake of thinking the movie wasn’t a big event, this feels like a last-ditch effort to assure the public that there’s still gas in the tank.
Fantastic Four: First Steps, by contrast, seems like a much fresher direction. It's set in a retrofuturist 1960s. The footage shown at SDCC was in a boxy 4.3 aspect ratio. And, most importantly, none of the cast members playing the Fantastic Four have previously played members of the Fantastic Four. Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Vanessa Kirby are all rising stars who have been given the opportunity to play iconic characters. Marvel isn't bringing back Ioan Gruffudd or Michael B. Jordan.
This may seem like a low bar, but the MCU has increasingly favored old reliable actors instead of new blood — even when, in the case of RDJ playing Doctor Doom, there's little rationale outside of ‘this will make money’. Disney getting the rights to the Fox characters seemed like an opportunity to turn over a new leaf after Endgame, and Fantastic Four seems like it could be just that. But by and large, the MCU's efforts with these characters have been nostalgic retreads of what came before without any purpose beyond asking you to ‘remember when’.
Deadpool 𓃲& Wolverine Means Nothi💟ng For The MCU
Deꦚadpool & Wolverine doe🅺s have a story, but it's not one that has any impact on the MCU
