Deadpool & Wolverine is meant to be both a beginning and an end. The third of the Ryan Reynolds films about Marvel’s merc with a mouth is the character’s MCU debut, but it also shuts the book on the Fox era of superhero films. It doesn’t do either particularly well, instead mostly acting as a receptacle for endless cameos and progressively tired meta-jokes. But in the very last minutes of the movie, literally during the credits, Deadpool & Wolverine gives the Fox era the send-off it deserves.
When the long-awaited team-up of Reynolds’ Deadpool and Jackman’s Wolverine (okay, they were both in X-Men Origins: Wolverine but we don’t talk about that film) comes to a close the credits begin to roll, and they contain a surprise for fans. Next to the endless scroll of names of those who worked on this movie is a montage. It’s not a gag reel for Deadpool & Wolverine or a jokey end-credit sting (the movie does still have one of those at the very end, however). Instead, it’s a montage of iconics moments and behind-the-scenes footage spanning the entire catalog of Fox’s Marvel movies. If you grew up watching them, it will make you cry.
Set to Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” the credit montage is a loving send-off to the non-MCU Marvel films. Over the course of a few minutes, we see clips from the X-Men movies, the Fantastic Four (both iterations), the Deadpool films, and more. This is all intercut with behind-the-scenes footage of the actors who gave life to these beloved characters, smiling and having fun in the midst of making these movies that would become so iconic. Seeing Ian McKellen do a costume test for the Magneto helmet hits hard. Seeing Reynolds talk so excitedly about portraying Deadpool even back in Origins is equally meaningful, showing how long he has been invested in this character.
What makes it special is that it doesn’t just focus on the good. Sure, there’s a lot of space in the montage given to the 2000 X-Men movie and X-Men: First Class, but you also see clips from what are widely considered the worst parts of the Fox catalog, such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. It’s a celebration of everything good and bad from an era that brought superheroes into the modern age through trial and error. As Ryan Reynolds put it in an Instagram post to celebrate Deadpool & Wolverine’s release, it was a “fun, weird, uneven, and risky world” that 20th Century Fox created.
It’s just disappointing that Deadpool & Wolverine itself can’t be that heartfelt goodbye. The movie retains the constant meta-jokes, violence, and easter eggs found in the first two Deadpool movies but lacks the same heart. Deadpool & Wolverine forgoes the emotional core beneath Deadpool’s humor in favor of appealing purely to the most tired part of fandom culture. It constantly uses cameos and references to other Fox and MCU projects as a crutch rather than building a compelling story of its own. Blade shows up and it’s cool, he says that one line you laughed at in 1998! His character, however, means nothing for Deadpool & Wolverine as a story of its own. That is true of most every cameo that shows up.
Deadpool & Wolverine fails to give the films that came before the goodbye they deserve, so the movie throws a montage at the end of it all to do the job. It’s a wonderful montage, and It does make me reminisce about how important the Fox era was, but it doesn’t change the fact that that emotion comes solely from footage of those movies, not from Deadpool & Wolverine.
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