Deadpool & Wolverine’s Stunning Box Office Promises X-Treme Future for MCU

Superhero fatigue, meet Deadpool. Deadpool, please “Careless Whisper” superhero fatigue out the door. Yep, it’s easy to opine this morning that Marvel Studios is back in a big way following one of the best opening weekends in the studio’s 16-year history. As of press time, Deadpool & Wolverine is estimated to have earned an eye-watering $211 million in its first three days at the North American box office. That’s easily a franchise best for Deadpool, Wolverine, and the greater X-Men saga, as well as the highest opening weekend for any R-rated movie. Ever. In fact, only five movies have grossed more in their domestic debuts than Deadpool & Wolverine, crossing that hallowed $200 million threshold, and three of them are also Marvel Studios joints… although, perhaps tellingly, the only other one to mark this milestone in the decade after Avengers: Endgame is Spider-Man: No Way Home.

When coupled with a global rollout of an estimated $443 million, Deadpool & Wolverine appears well on track to outpace the impressive grosses of its predecessors, with Deadpool having earned $783 million in 2016, and Deadpool 2 accumulating $786 million in 2018. Whether Deadpool & Wolverine has a shot at becoming the highest grossing R-rated movie of all-time remains to be seen (right now Joker and Oppenheimer are the two biggest “adult” movies on the block, with $1.08 billion and $975 million, respectively).

However, the fact Deadpool & Wolverine earned a sterling “A” CinemaScore from polled audiences is a good indication it has a shot via enthusiastic word of mouth. For context, Deadpool had a nearly 6x multiplier atop its then-record shattering $132 million opening. So if Deadpool & Wolverine can similarly leg out, it will definitely cross $1 billion worldwide.

This is obviously champagne-corking news for Marvel Studios, who seems poised to turn a corner between this box office hit and their headline-grabbing SDCC panel over the weekend. It is also a chance to recalibrate the media narrative for their core genre after a couple of relatively brutal years (although nothing nearly as bad as what the distinguished competition across the street has just gone through).

Last year was in fact a nadir for the MCU. While Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did respectable business and earned $846 million worldwide, that number was down from Vol. 2’s $864 million cume from over half a decade earlier. That movie was also seen as another swan song for the MCU’s 2010s glory days. Conversely, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels’ bleak box office runs fed into the seemingly demonstrable phenomenon of “superhero fatigue” when juxtaposed with WB/DC’s outright disastrous 2023.

Well, if 2023 is a nadir, then Deadpool & Wolverine shows a likely path forward for sunnier days in the MCU. The film is again playing better than any non-Spidey Marvel movie released in this decade. By contrast, the now-third highest MCU opening of the 2020s is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which grossed an impressive $187 million in its first three days. However, that film was also divisive among fans for the way it subverted expectations, and its “B+” CinemaScore foreshadowed what turned out to be a steep 67 percent drop in its second weekend, and a box office run that failed to reach $1 billion despite that massive opening (and the PG-13 advantage it has over Deadpool & Wolverine).

This is all a way to say that despite the fan-service excesses of Deadpool & Wolverine leaving some critics (including admittedly this one) mixed on the film, those qualities are obviously playing like gangbusters with the fans the movie is made for. And when one considers that the other eye-popping MCU box office success of this decade is Spider-Man: No Way Home, it is easy to draw a correlation: both Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine work as straight-ahead, unironic, and deeply nostalgic love letters to the superhero genre’s past. (One might point out the irony in a Doctor Strange movie being more transgressive with its cameos than Deadpool.) D&W and NWH benefitted both from bringing back Tobey Maguire and Hugh Jackman in their signature superhero roles 20 or more years after they first played them. That each film was also able to redeem characterizations that audiences rejected the first time, be it Andrew Garfield as Spidey or the many spoilerish cameos in Deadpool & Wolverine, is likewise telling. 

When compared to the struggles Marvel has endured recently with launching new characters or IP like the Eternals or two-thirds of The Marvels’ lead characters, there is a seeming lesson in this about the advantages of looking backward at the moment and playing the hits… especially if those hits wear an “X” on their uniforms.

Almost infamously at this point, Marvel Studios has yet to create their own version of the beloved X-Men, a group of characters whose popularity seems as evergreen as Spider-Man or Batman. Many fans are desperate to see the X-Men get the MCU treatment. One reading of Deadpool & Wolverine’s achingly wistful mid-credits sequence, which resembles a valedictorian address for the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies, is to think Marvel Studios is saying goodbye to that legacy and ready to turn the page to their own era. Some fans, including our own Joe George, are anxious to finally see that happen.

But after this weekend… we shall see? (Sorry, Joe.) While Marvel has had great success at rebooting Spider-Man with Tom Holland and looks poised to do the same with the Fantastic Four next year, the studio’s biggest recent hits involved cherrypicking certain aspects of old superhero movies—Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina here, Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds there—and bringing them back for maximum applause. While one way to read Deadpool & Wolverine is that it’s a fond farewell to the Fox-Verse, another is to see it as a bridge for Marvel to pick and choose which elements they’d like to bring back.

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige is an undeniably brilliant producer, and surely sees the need to innovate the X-Men moving forward. But who knows, perhaps after the next couple of Avengers movies, an even more successful way to do that would be in a newly integrated “sacred timeline” that has space for Reynolds, Jackman, and a few other iconic castings to run around with new versions of Marvel’s merry mutants? Nostalgia is playing a big part in Marvel’s greatest recent successes. Feige and Marvel Studios have obviously taken note, too, since the biggest announcement at SDCC this year was that Robert Downey Jr. is coming back to the MCU… but as Doctor Doom. It’s simultaneously new and old, looking to the future and the past for maximum fan-grabbing impact. We suspect we’re not done seeing some other fan favorite castings having the time of their lives either after that box office bow.

Deadpool & Wolverine is playing in theaters now.