Why Hollywood Needs Deadpool & Wolverine to be a Hit

Not long ago I wrote that one of the reasons why Hollywood was so bullish on Inside Out 2 was that it needed for the film to be a success because, unlike those more idiosyncratic films that were successes last year (Barbie, Oppenheimer, etc.), such a success would affirm what it so badly wants to believe in, namely the continued salability of brand-name franchise films of the familiar kinds--like sequels to past Disney-Pixar animated spectacles--that had such a miserable time at the box office in 2023 and early 2024, yet remain so important to Hollywood's business model.

The same kind of need is operative in the anticipations for Deadpool & Wolverine, which box office-watchers are looking to not only for more proof of the broad salability of brand-name franchise films, but more specifically affirmation of the salability of the superhero film that has had an especially bad time (2023 bringing The Flash, and Captain Marvel 2, and Aquaman 2, and Ant-Man 3, as well as lesser failures like Shazam 2), and in which not just Disney-Marvel but Sony and the WBD remain so heavily invested. (Thus does Disney's Bob Iger actually seem to think that putting out a "mere" three Marvel movies a year is some display of great restraint on the studio's part!)

At the time of this writing Inside Out 2's status as at least a commercial success seems unquestionable. (The sequel has, even after adjusting for inflation, overtaken the domestic gross of the original film as of its third weekend in play as the film continues to show fairly good holds, and broken the $1 billion mark globally, so that its overtopping the original at the worldwide level also seems all but assured.) Deadpool & Wolverine has yet to hit theaters, but thus far its chances of being a major hit seem excellent, with an opening weekend in the vicinity of $200 million looking not just possible but probable--and with it a billion dollar-plus gross for the film that will be a franchise best not just for the Deadpool trilogy, but the now quarter century-old X-Men franchise of which it is a part.

Of course, even if the film performs as so many clearly hope it will indicate only so much given how idiosyncratic the Deadpool movies are, as "edgy" and "meta" R-rated oddities of which audiences have had less than most of the other heroes around, which in this case has had its prospects boosted by the difficult-to-repeat gimmick of Deadpool's teaming with longtime audience favorite Wolverine. It will thus be far from solid proof that the audience is feeling its Phase Three eagerness for more Marvel Cinematic Universe films--but all the excuse that "confirmation bias"-driven Suits will need to greenlight another slew of big-budget superhero films that could easily blow still more holes in the balance sheets of studios already buckling under the insane financial battering of the last half decade, because to them and their masters that is so greatly preferable to changing how they do business especially if the pattern of 2023 was anything but a fluke.