No, Deadpool & Wolverine Was (Probably) Not a 4-Quadrant Film

Those who become familiar with the entertainment industry press also become familiar with the entertainment industry's jargon--or less kindly, its buzzwords, of which I think we are hearing more and more in the mainstream these days. One such buzzword is the "four quadrant movie," based on a gender-and-age division of the audience into the four "quadrants" of males over 25, males under 25, females over 25, females under 25.

In considering this conception of the market one should remember that the idea is to really appeal to all four groups, rather than appeal to one demographic which drags others with them (for instance, movies that appeal to children who make their parents take them when they would otherwise never see the movie, or, to invoke a recent stereotype, women wanting to see Barbie and dragging their husbands and boyfriends along, and reportedly ending many a relationship in the process).

Those who make movies commonly hope to attract the widest possible audience, aspiring to interest moviegoers across the entire range of age and gender--and those whose movies fail to do so lament the fact. For example, the backers of the last Bond movie No Time to Die were dismayed by the lack of interest among the young in the movie (a factor in the movie's relatively weak box office performance), while more recently Andy Muschietti told Variety that The Flash "failed to be a 4-quadrant movie."

However, a movie need not be a 4-quadrant film to make a billion dollars, as Deadpool & Wolverine showed. As those familiar with the material would expect, and those familiar with the fan base for the Deadpool character in particular would guess, the audience for the franchise skews both young, and male, and very sharply too, with the data about the ticket-buyers confirming this. At least in the early part of the movie's run 62 percent of the audience was male, and 37 percent in the age 18-24 range alone, numbers suggesting anything but really broadly distributed interest across the four quadrants, whatever Ryan Reynolds may claim about the matter.

In spite of that the movie was the highest-grossing live-action movie of 2024, defying the constriction of the market to gross a staggering $600 million in North America (and $1.3 billion globally).

That seems to me important not simply for analyzing Deadpool's success, but because it seems to affirm what I think is the trend in the bottom line of films based on what I have been seeing since 2023 especially--that in a time in which people are going to the movies less (the North American public averages 2 movie tickets a year now, rather than 3 or 4), and Hollywood's bread and butter offerings are pretty well exhausted, trying to appeal to a very broad audience is likely to work less well than appealing very strongly to a narrower section of the public (whether that section conforms to the bounds of the 4-quadrant division or not).