'Deadpool & Wolverine' and the Death of Hollywood Franchises

It was the dis heard round the film world. In the summer of 2019, Martin Scorsese raised eyebrows in the moviegoing community when he famously dismissed the entire output of Marvel Studios—still riding high on the record-breaking success of Avengers: Endgame—as something other than cinema. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them,” he told Empire magazine, “is theme parks.”

As a long-time fan of big-budget Hollywood spectacle and an early adopter of the house Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige built, many were disappointed by Scorsese’s comments. Rather than an outlier, at that time, the Marvel Studios project was firmly ensconced in the Hollywood tradition of visionary showmanship. As a film project consisting of 30+ movies spanning multiple genres yet held together by a singular creative vision, Marvel was engaged in a bold artistic experiment.

Then I watched Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine (2024). After a series of commercial and creative stumbles since the lofty heights of Endgame, the latest Deadpool offering was not the return to form fans hoped for. Its generous helpings of callbacks, Easter eggs, cameos, and inside baseball Disney-Fox merger jokes indiscriminately pile on and overwhelm the frail skeleton of a story meant to hold the thing together, leaving viewers with the sinking feeling that Scorsese isn’t wrong. He’s just premature.

As with Andy Muschietti’s superhero film The Flash (2023) and Fede Alvarez’s 2024 monster film Alien: Romulus, the superhero buddy comedy Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t so much a movie as a feature-length game of Trivial Pursuit, where the audience’s knowledge of IP arcana is tested and faithful devotion to the source material rewarded. With a box office haul of $636M and counting, more fan sycophancy may be on the way as the studios that manage these properties conclude that looking back is a safer bet than moving forward.

Safety First When Appealing to Fans

Of course, playing it safe is nothing new in the Hollywood movie business. Since the days of Goldwyn and Mayer, studio bosses have managed the inherent unpredictability of a business built on selling stories by playing the odds and hedging their bets: adapt a famous novel, cast a beloved star, assign a respected director, and include a theme song by a popular recording artist.

The goal of all this hedging was to make every new movie feel a bit less so, using the comfort of the familiar to entice fickle audiences to give new stories a chance. Judicious use of fan service—a cameo here, an Easter egg there—falls squarely in this tradition. However, as expensive franchises take up more shelf space in production slates, the industry’s natural risk aversion seems to have gone into overdrive. It skips over the “new story” part altogether and goes hard after familiarity. Why take a risk on something new that may not work when you can always recycle something old that did?

Why not bring Robert Downey, Jr. back to the MCU to play iconic villain Dr. Doom instead of casting a new actor? Why not fearlessly cross the uncanny valley to digitally resurrect the late Ian Holm for an unnecessary cameo in Alien: Romulus? As critic Susan Polo notes in Polygon, the studios’ commitment to the path already traveled explains how, in 2023, we ended up with “Kang getting second billing in Ant-Man and Loki, Wonder Woman saving the day in Shazam, and the cast of 2013’s Man of Steel and 1989’s Batman in The Flash.”

As franchises become more preoccupied with fetishizing the past, we can now understand Scorsese’s complaint about Marvel as a complaint against franchise filmmaking in general. A cinema that eschews the unpredictable thrills of storytelling for the predictable ones of fan service will inevitably result in something more akin to a theme park ride than anything resembling a narrative where audiences have an opportunity to connect with a protagonist’s struggle. A franchise cinema devoted to nostalgic fan service does not produce movies. It produces branded merch.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything…”

As far back as the dawn of a studio system populated by vaudeville transplants, Hollywood’s first love has always been spectacle. Many of these showpeople and their spiritual descendants heartily embraced the promise of the new medium to explore the human condition on the largest canvases possible: ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, medieval Europe, the vast open Frontier of the American West, Arabian deserts, and galaxies far, far away. These visionary filmmakers gave us protagonists’ struggles full of sound and fury that would lodge in the minds of impressionable youngsters and instill in them an abiding love of the medium. (Mine began with a chance childhood encounter with the magic of Ray Harryhausen in Don Chaffey’s 1963 fantasy, Jason and the Argonauts.)

Rather than an unwelcomed interloper, franchise filmmaking is just the latest iteration of the summer blockbuster, which was the offspring of the big studio spectacles of Hollywood’s golden age. We can draw a straight line from the fantasy and sci-films of Georges Méliès at the turn of the last century (A Trip to the Moon, 1902) through the visual effects extravaganzas of Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments, 1956) and onto the summer blockbuster cinema of Steven Spielberg (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981) and James Cameron (Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991). From there, it’s a straight shot to the current large-scale genre works of Christopher Nolan (Tenet, 2020), Denis Villenue (Dune, 2021), and—yes—the Russo brothers (Avengers: Endgame, 2019), Zach Snyder (Zack Snyder’s Justice League, 2021), and James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 2023). Therein lies the hope. If the studio machine of Hollywood’s golden era could make room for visionary auteurs with stories to tell, so can franchise filmmaking, but only if today’s moguls stop trying to fix something that is not broken.

In his classic 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade, veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously declared that, in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything”. Since then, many have assumed Goldman was pointing out a bug in the business model when, in fact, he was pointing out a feature. As anyone who has told a bad joke knows, telling stories is an inherently fraught business. There’s no telling how they will be received. For every person who connects with the story, another doesn’t.

Goldman’s rule was on display when Marvel started to falter post-Endgame. Observers were as split about the causes as Star Wars fans at a Last Jedi retrospective. Among highbrow cineastes, the slippage was seen as proof-positive of franchise fatigue and a prophetic call for the industry to abandon its greedy ways and return to the cinema of modestly ambitious mid-budget movies and small, boutique films. A very online—and very loud—segment of Marvel stans, on the other hand, looked upon the studios’ unsteady performance and saw the fruit of apostasy. The studio was reaping the bitter harvest of its decision to ignore fans in favor of outsiders who had their own designs on the franchise. (Weird indie directors! Social Justice Warriors! Brie Larson!). These fans called on Marvel to repent and return to the old ways.

Lost amidst all the handwringing was the possibility that the answer to Marvel’s troubles may be less dramatic. Sometimes—many times—movies flop. Something that looks like a slam dunk during production is an embarrassment at the box office. Over time, entire genres go in and out of fashion (think Westerns). In other words, nobody knows anything—not the auteurs or fans.

The Endgame

A recent Variety article reveals that in addition to the traditional focus groups that have been part of the industry for decades, in the age of the franchise, studios have also taken to assembling panels of “superfans” to review marketing possibilities for major franchise entries. One studio executive confesses that input from these panels has sometimes led to changes to the films themselves. “If it’s early enough and the movie isn’t finished yet,” the executive said, “we can make those kinds of changes.”

The irony of chasing after fan approval to mitigate risk is that these fandoms would not exist without risky bets in the first place. Star Wars fans wouldn’t know the first thing about Luke, Han, and Leia if George Lucas had not dreamt them up first. For their part, Trekkers would not have anything to argue about without Gene Roddenberry’s initial vision of a “Wagon Train to the stars.” Fandom is always downstream of innovation. As the late Steve Jobs noted when speaking about the development of the groundbreaking iMac personal computer: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

If studios want to remain in the business of making movies rather than just selling branded merchandise, they must continue to cultivate diverse storytellers who can bring their visions to the biggest canvas and see what sticks. Franchise films may not have started as theme parks, but the relentless drive to eliminate risk will quickly turn them into the very thing their detractors fear. Deadpool & Wolverine is the harbinger of this danger to Hollywood’s franchise film storytelling.