Is Deadpool Actually Hollywood's Most Successful Piece of '90s Nostalgia to Date?

I remember how when it hit theaters critics received Deadpool as a great novelty because it was a dark, edgy, R-rated film that took an ostentatiously postmodernist, "meta," approach to its material.

Instead of being struck by how novel it supposedly was, I was struck by how familiar it was, and especially by how '90s it all was. After all, dark and edgy R-rated superhero films were fairly common in that decade--when we had The Crow, and Barb Wire, and Spawn, and Blade.

Those films may not have gone as far down the path of "meta" as Deadpool, but they had their share of self-aware silliness nonetheless, quite naturally given how this sensibility absolutely saturated, even defined, the film of the decade. Indeed, watching the first Deadpool, with its combination of edgelordism in the surface details with conventionality and even triteness in the underlying essentials, its ceaseless and often self-deprecatory fourth wall-breaking and rapid-fire pop culture references, its barrage of tasteless humor, I felt myself to be watching a '90s indie movie in the tradition of Smith, Tarantino et. al. about superheroes.

Indeed, it is entirely relevant that Deadpool was himself a creation of the 1990s--a Rob Liefeld co-creation who first appeared in the December 1990 issue of New Mutants who was entirely in tune with the period's notorious penchant for anti-heroes and general edginess and the "extreme"--and snarky irony about the whole thing. And in fact I found it strange that few commented on this--an indication that the increasing overgenerousness of the average film review reflects not only increasing claquing, but plain and simple ignorance of their subject among the current generation of "professional" critics.

Still, if few have remarked it, it strikes me that, between the intense "'90s-ness" of Deadpool and Hollywood's failure to have much success with evocations of the '90s, Deadpool may well be the most successful piece of '90s cinematic nostalgia to date, with Deadpool & Wolverine continuing to walk that path--not least by teaming Deadpool up with Wolverine in the costume a generation remembers from the still well-loved '90s-era X-Men cartoon to do battle with the just-barely-missed-the-'90s-chronologically-and- arguably-actually-really-'90s-in-essence Cassandra Nova.

* Spawn, of course, was trimmed to get a PG-13 in its 1997 theatrical release, but the R-rated Director's Cut later came out on video.