If Ryan Reynolds is trying to stoke enthusiasm for a future Deadpool versus Wolverine movie he’s going about it the right way. The new short film that accompanies James Mangold’s Logan in cinemas – now also available to view online – features Reynolds’ foul-mouthed mutant strolling past posters of Jackman’s current blockbuster and cracking funnies about the adamantium-clawed antihero’s lack of a proper superhero suit. It’s a timely reminder that 20th Century Fox has more than one big hitter in its X-Men-centred saga.
The small matter of Jackman’s supposed retirement from the role of Wolverine, not to mention certain climactic events that take place during Logan, do rather complicate the prospect of a joint outing. But given that Mangold’s movie takes place in 2029 and Deadpool is presumably set in the present day, there’s plenty of time for a rousing prequel featuring both mutants. In many ways, the pair are the perfect odd couple, Reynolds’ Deadpool irreverent, cocky and garrulous to a fault; Jackman’s Wolverine possessing features that often seem permanently fixed in an Eastwoodesque scowl. The duo have previously teamed up in the comics, and both mutants are currently operating within an R-rated sphere that makes them highly compatible on the big screen. Jackman has previously spoken out against the idea, but that was before Logan cleaned up at the global box office this weekend with an earth-shattering $237.8m worldwide.
Moreover, the buddy superhero flick is already well on its way to becoming a thing. Marvel Studios has lined up Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Chris Hemsworth’s son of Odin for a cosmic road trip in November’s Thor: Ragnarok. And there’s the small matter of July’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, with Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man expected to operate as Peter Parker’s middle-aged sidekick. These movies offer the inter-superhero badinage adored by fans, without the need for foggy, epic-scale storylines in which the fine details of individual heroes’ eccentricities inevitably tend to get lost.
The emergence of Wolverine and Deadpool as the big beasts of the X-Verse is timely, as Fox producer Lauren Shuler Donner admits in a new interview with Vanity Fair that the saga cannot continue telling the story of Professor X’s eternal battle with Magneto forever. While there’s still the small matter of a mooted 90s-set X-Men movie titled Supernova, it looks likely that the duelling frenemies will soon be allowed to take a back seat while others move to the fore. X-Men: First Class successfully reinvigorated the franchise in 2011 by presenting the pair’s path from friendship to enmity for the first time in a previous timeline, as well as recasting the roles of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender). But the relative failure of last year’s X-Men: Apocalypse, which briefly reduced Magneto to the title villain’s minion, suggests Fox’s writers are fast running out of ideas.
This should hardly be a surprise. We’ve now seen Professor X and Magneto marshalling their chess pieces in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 2000s and 2020s in six movies stretching over the best part of two decades. There remain a half century’s worth of unfilmed stories in the comic books, but the question is whether audiences – right now – have any sort of appetite for them. Fox has also rather hamstrung itself by delivering two standalone efforts whose quality shows up the most recent X-Men outing, rather than encouraging audiences to catch future instalments of the main saga.
This is a problem for Fox if it hopes to ape the success of rival Marvel. The unique selling point of the Disney-owned studio’s pioneering cinematic universe is that filmgoers can be confident each instalment sits within the same continuity and has (usually) been made with the same level of care and attention as its predecessors. By contrast, Logan and Deadpool both seem to exist within their own bubble, and there is no guarantee that the studio’s next ensemble outing will get the box-office bounce from either that, say, Iron Man 3 got from the success of The Avengers in 2012.
The logical answer would be for Fox to take the gritty vibe of its R-rated movies and create a mini-cinematic universe set in the present day, with Deadpool and Wolverine at its centre. Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, a surefire box-office titan if she can be prepared to return, could be recruited to join in, since the shapeshifting mutant ages more gradually than normal human beings and would presumably still look young in 2017. Fox also has plans for an X-Force movie, potentially led by Reynolds, and there has been talk of films based on the Alpha Flight and Exiles comics. Taken together, these would be more than enough to form the core of a new shared universe.
Patrick Stewart has never been better as Xavier than as a dilapidated, mentally fading nonagenarian version of the powerful mutant in Logan, a development that is telling. It’s as if Stewart has been freed from the rigid cage of Professor X’s eternal war with Magneto, allowing him to finally find the soul of the X-Men’s mentor at the umpteenth time of asking. This is hardly a shock: no other superhero saga has kept the same double act going for so long: it’s as if Batman had battled the Joker in every movie since his 1966 big-screen debut.
By dispensing with Professor X and Magneto, at least for a while, Fox would be following in the footsteps of Marvel, which appears to be slowly moving towards a world without the usual leaders of The Avengers, Chris Evans’ Captain America and Downey Jr’s Iron Man. If both superheroes survive beyond the events of the forthcoming Infinity War double header, it will most likely be in semi-retired form, and this is entirely sensible. Audiences eventually get fatigue when the same stories are recycled over and over again, a problem that’s at the heart of the DCEU’s current travails. Zack Snyder’s gun-toting, Harley Quinn punching version of Batman was reimagined in order to differentiate Batfleck from the popular Christian Bale take on the dark knight, the latter having retired the cape and cowl only a few years previously. Likewise, Henry Cavill’s Superman is a strangely insipid, overly modernised version of Kal-El precisely because producers fear repeating the mistakes of 2006’s Superman Returns, a movie that riffed too heavily on Christopher Reeve’s wonderfully nuanced performances as the big blue boy scout in the late 70s and 80s.
Unlike Warner Bros, which is pitching its entire expanded universe around Bats and Supes, Fox now has a unique opportunity to place the most famous members of its universe on hiatus without damaging its overall brand, thanks to the success of Logan and Deadpool. It’s a chance the studio should seize with both hands.
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