What is a movie? It sounds like a silly question, perhaps, but it's one that's been rattling around my head ever since I walked out of Deadpool & Wolverine last Friday. Marvel's cameo-stuffed, fourth-wall-breaking superhero sequel made a staggering $438.3m across its opening weekend - a record for an R-rated film. It feels in many ways like a watershed moment. But not a good one. If we are watching, as some critics have suggested, the death of cinema happen before our eyes, then it’s taken the form of a public execution.
There have been plenty of “worse” movies than Deadpool & Wolverine. Even within the remit of Marvel’s own conveyor-belt oeuvre, last year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder were far messier affairs – structurally chaotic and aesthetically rebarbative to the extent that Deadpool & Wolverine is not. But Deadpool feels somehow the most cynical of all of the canon to date, the most spiritually and creatively bereft. It is a film that is about absolutely nothing – a film with no discernable purpose or artistic ambitions, beyond the perpetuation of its own corporate myth.
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