‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ reverses Marvel’s box office slump
Marvel Studios, trying to move past a pair of box office humiliations, deployed two of its most popular characters over the weekend and hit a mother lode.
The potty-mouthed Deadpool and hard-drinking Wolverine — packaged together for the first time on movie screens — were on pace to sell roughly $205 million in tickets in the United States and Canada, box office analysts said Sunday. “Deadpool &Wolverine” will easily set a record for the largest R-rated movie opening in Hollywood history, even when adjusting for inflation. The current record-holder, “Deadpool” (2016), arrived to more than $175 million in today’s dollars.
“Deadpool &Wolverine” was expected to collect an additional $233 million overseas, for a global total after only 3 1/2 days of play of roughly $438 million — a start on par with Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (2022), which went on to sell about $1 billion in tickets.
Directed by Shawn Levy, “Deadpool &Wolverine” cost an estimated $320 million to make and market worldwide.
Marvel badly needed a win. Two of its releases last year, “The Marvels” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” disappointed at the box office, ending an unbroken 15-year winning streak for the boutique studio and beginning a period of intense Wall Street scrutiny. Marvel’s weakness played a role in proxy battles for Disney board seats earlier this year. (In the end, Disney fended off the activist investors, including Nelson Peltz, a founder of Trian Partners, and Ike Perlmutter, the former chair of Marvel Entertainment.)
Superheroes are not the sure things they used to be. DC Studios, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, is working on its fourth reboot strategy in eight years following disappointments like “The Flash,” “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” and “Blue Beetle.” Sony has struggled with “Spider-Man” spinoffs like “Madame Web” and “Morbius.” The problem is that the movie and television marketplace is awash in the characters, and some of the most popular ones have already been fully exploited (at least for now).
“Over the next few years, hopefully Marvel and DC can launch one or two big new series to sustain the genre,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “Superheroes play well in all markets around the world. They’re extremely important to the business.”
Marvel movie plots have grown increasingly convoluted, at least for casual viewers. “Deadpool &Wolverine” has something to do with a “sacred timeline” and “anchor beings” and a “metaphysical graveyard” called the Void. (“Good luck if you’re coming in with no prior knowledge,” David Sims, a critic for The Atlantic, wrote in his review.)
But “Deadpool &Wolverine” was mostly built as a love letter to Marvel fans — an effort to show die-hards that the studio had rediscovered its mojo.
In one scene, Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool, looks directly at the screen and says, “Nerds, it’s about to get good.” A bloody battle between Deadpool and Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman, commences.
Ticket buyers gave “Deadpool &Wolverine” an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls. About 97% of fan reviews on RottenTomatoes.com, a review-aggregation site, were positive; only one Marvel movie, “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” has ever scored better by that measure.
To support the movie’s release, Disney sent Reynolds and Jackman on an overseas publicity tour that stopped in China, South Korea, Brazil, Germany and the United Kingdom. Perhaps to telegraph that this is not a movie for children, or perhaps because they simply felt like it, the stars peppered their public comments with expletives.
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