For all the dirty jokes, club drugs, buckets of blood and slapstick gags, “Deadpool & Wolverine” might be the most emotional movie of the summer. Hollywood insiders and superhero movie fans were shocked to discover that last weekend’s Marvel blockbuster was nothing more than a big goodbye to 20th Century Fox.
After all, that defunct studio, founded in 1935 and sold to Disney by Rupert Murdoch in 2019, was where Deadpool first appeared on screen in a tight-fitting suit and with guns. The studio also produced Marvel movies for two decades, most notably the X-Men series that catapulted Hugh Jackman to stardom. Those characters first appeared in Marvel comics but were licensed to Fox, making them operate outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the alias for Disney films and Marvel TV adaptations). The merger with Disney changed all that.
Amid the comic violence and fourth-wall-breaking in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” there’s a heartfelt tribute to the creators who powered Fox’s Marvel machine. On a desert set meant to riff on “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” a skyscraper-sized statue of the 20th Century Fox logo is buried in the sand (it looks a bit like “Ozymandias,” at least if Shelley was more interested in studio lots than pharaonic monuments).
To pay homage to heroes whose cinematic exploits were cut short by mergers or box office failures, director Shawn Levy has brought in a cast of forgotten Marvel characters—including Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Chris Evans’ Human Torch (from “Fantastic Four”), and Wesley Snipes’ Blade—in cameos. The cast of leftovers also includes Channing Tatum as Gambit, a supernatural wielder whose greatest adversary was Fox’s Green Light Committee. The project spent a decade in development hell without ever getting a movie made. But what happened during the end of “Deadpool vs. Wolverine”? A montage of behind-the-scenes footage from this library of titles plays over Green Day’s “Khalas Ya Zaman.” This retrospective resonated strongly with many filmmakers, actors and executives of those projects, who did not expect to choke up while watching such an obscene adventure.
“All of these guys grew up together in and around Fox movies and, later, Marvel-Fox movies,” Simon Kinberg, a prolific writer and director from Fox’s Marvel universe and executive producer of the “Deadpool” franchise, tells Variety. “I can’t imagine that particular group not touching on the franchise they’re leaving behind.”
While fans may adore many of these films, even diehard fans would admit that quality control has not been one of Fox’s greatest strengths. After all, for every critical success like “X2” or “Logan,” there’s a lesser-known superhero movie in the studio’s universe—and the less said about “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” the better.
What’s even more surprising is that a creative force like Reynolds—who holds a blank check from Disney and Marvel—would use his MCU debut to praise 20th Century Fox, which Disney swallowed whole five years ago. The $71.3 billion deal may have made the Murdoch family very rich, but it left Hollywood with one less movie studio and thousands of jobs lost. But regardless of the relative merits of mergers and acquisitions, Reynolds seemed to feel that fans needed to close one chapter before writing a new one.
“There’s a lot of trust in Ryan, who also has the marketing chops,” Kinberg says of Reynolds, who now holds the record for the biggest opening weekend ever for an R-rated film in the United States and around the world. “He has a deep understanding of the R-rated superhero audience.”
20th Century Fox churned out Marvel movies at a dizzying rate for two decades, with a new installment every two to three years for the “X-Men” franchise (with plenty of spinoffs sprinkled throughout). The studio gave us unforgettable cultural icons, with Jackman’s Wolverine being the most enduring. But Halle Berry’s Storm, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, and the blue-skinned Mystique (represented early on by Rebecca Romijn, then revisited by Jennifer Lawrence) have been immortalized in Halloween costumes and TikTok makeup tutorials to this day.
However, the triumphal march wasn’t always a success, both with critics and at the box office. Yes, “X-Men” opened in 2000 with an 82% Rotten Tomatoes rating and grossed $300 million on a $75 million budget. But Ben Affleck’s Daredevil and Garner’s Elektra (who had audiences clamoring for her guest appearance in “Deadpool & Wolverine”) stumbled in the early 2000s. An early attempt at a Fantastic Four movie with Evans and Jessica Alba managed to make a decent box office return, but a 2015 reboot with an all-new cast was a financial disaster. Marvel will try again with 2025’s “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” this time recruiting the likes of Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby as they attempt to finally deliver a superhero team-up movie that lives up to its name.
Reynolds himself embraced the mixed record after the blockbuster's release last weekend, posting on social media that the film was “a farewell to a place and era that literally made us. We are forever grateful to the fun, weird, unbalanced, risky world of 20th Century Fox.”
