Why Has Deadpool Been Such a Hit with its Core Demographic?

While Ryan Reynolds claimed Deadpool & Wolverine was a 4-quadrant hit, the reality seems to be that the movie was overwhelmingly a hit in one demographic area, skewing male and young--even by superhero film standards.

The fact has not got much publicity, unsurprisingly in light of the associated cultural politics. The conventional wisdom holds that audiences which are the opposite--not male, not young--are grossly underserved by Hollywood, such that when a supposedly rare movie seen as playing to a different audience "finally" hits theaters and appears to make any money at all (perhaps marginally, perhaps not even that) there is much crowing about the fact, and the movie held up as an object lesson in how well Hollywood could be doing if it paid those other demographics more attention. The success of a movie on the terms on which Deadpool succeeded, of course, is not consistent with that narrative, and slighted accordingly.

Still, the fact that a movie scored big by appealing to a slice of the audience very deeply rather than being aimed at everybody a little bit seems to me worth remarking as consistent with the way Hollywood "hit-making" has been going in this period of reduced moviegoing (it's been just 2 ticket sales per capita in North America in 2022-2024, vs. 3-4 before the pandemic) and failing longtime strategies (Hollywood's offering very little we haven't seen a million times before).

That makes the way in which it appealed worth a word. The Deadpool sequel, like its predecessor the marriage of such indie movie crapola with an A-list-adjacent superhero in a way that James Gunn would probably have loved to give audiences but never quite got the chance to do, appealed to its audience on the basis of nihilism, flippancy, metafiction and "transgression" with results likely to be repulsive or trite to the grown-up but exercise a powerful influence on the minds of those not quite so grown-up but pretending to be--and accordingly had potential to be a hit with "the 18-24s" on that level. This was all the more the case because of a difference in the kind of superhero film they grew up with as against what their elders knew. For those superhero fans who came of age in, for example, the '90s, watching the films and shows of the Crow and Spawn and Blade franchises (among others), and more generally accustomed to foul-mouthed, blood-soaked action movies, while remembering all too well that '90s indie movie spirit, that '90s irony, and perhaps too its manifestations in such comedies as (the underrated) Mystery Men, Deadpool may not be so special--but on those whose frame of reference is defined by straightforward, usually earnest, PG-13 spectacles such as Marvel offers, it made an impression. All that did not rule out interest from other groups--but all the same, they were less likely to be so great a part of the hardcore fan base for the franchise as the younger cohort.