Cinema is not going through the Dark Ages. Something odder than that is happening. Rather than plague following Vandals through the continents, flights of hopefulness oscillate with trails of despair. Monks clanged bells ominously when Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and The Fall Guy underperformed. Then Inside Out 2 saved cinema and ushered in a provisional Renaissance.
All of this puts new sorts of pressure on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The once untouchable franchise has, over the past few years, been travelling along its own sine wave. Down with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Up with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. Way down with The Marvels. There is a sense of the Disney-owned operation taking a deep breath before lunging into the second half of the decade. The asterisked 2020 aside, this will be the first year with only one Marvel release since 2012, when The Avengers conquered the known universe.
Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine fits awkwardly into the cycle. For a start, the film is a sequel to two titles that, while based on a Marvel comic character, were not officially part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The theology of all this would give you a headache. Deadpool, foul-mouthed mercenary, was, as a product of the X-Men universe, among the rump retained by 20th Century Fox when Disney bought Marvel Studios. Disney then acquired Fox, and that wall came down. Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were, also, significantly more sweary, sexual and violent than your family-oriented MCU content. Deadpool & Wolverine – starring Ryan Reynolds as the former thug and Hugh Jackman as the latter X-Man – is the first film in the series to carry an R-rating in the US. (Even our own, less puritanical classifier felt compelled to impose a 16 certificate.)
Shawn Levy, an agreeable Canadian with a CV that includes Night at the Museum and Free Guy, is doing a good job of appearing nonchalant about having to save cinema.
Paul Howard: I said I’d never love another dog as much as I loved Humphrey. I was wrong
Gladiator II review: Don’t blame Paul Mescal but there’s no good reason for this jumbled sequel to exist
We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
“I didn’t know that was my job when Ryan asked me to direct a third Deadpool movie,” he says. “I would argue that it’s still not my job. Look, I came to this as a fan of Marvel. I think many of us have loved so many of those movies. They’re built into the fabric of our lives and our global culture. When we started working on this movie, we didn’t know that it would be released in a time where people are talking about and writing about superhero fatigue and the future of the MCU. That’s all above my pay grade.”
Let us resist the temptation to speculate about how much Shawn Levy gets paid and move on to consider an interesting cast. If you pay only passing attention to the MCU you might be surprised at the people who have ended up on the payroll: Robert Redford, William Hurt, Harrison Ford, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Rachel Weisz and on and on. It’s a good gig if you can get it. The latest unlikely enlistee is Emma Corrin. The English actor, a graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, is best known for playing Princess Diana on The Crown, and comes into Deadpool as the sinister Cassandra Nova Xavier, twin sister to the X-Men’s Charles Xavier.
Corrin (who uses “they” and “them” pronouns) appears to be having a blast. Does this feel like the same job as roller-skating about the palace in The Crown? That was a hugely expensive series, but it was a different business from integrating with the computer-generated environments in the MCU. They are now part of an industry within an industry.
“I was expecting it to be very different,” they say. “I was expecting there to be a lot of green screen. I don’t think I shot a single one of my scenes against a green screen. Ray Chan, our production designer, designed the most incredible sets that were real worlds. They were completely new, 360-degree sets – with such intricate detailed design and functional aspects. You’d press a button and stairs would appear. But, yes, it was different, obviously, because I’d never been on something on this scale.”
[ The Crown’s Charles and Diana years: A world of privilege, glamour and tensionOpens in new window ]
It does feel like a shift for Corrin. They were raised in Tunbridge Wells, and made their television debut in an episode of Grantchester before landing that plum role on The Crown in 2020. They picked up a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice award for playing the late princess, going on to become the first nonbinary star on the cover of Vogue. Later this year they turn up in Robert Eggers’s much-anticipated Nosferatu.
“This was such a joy to do,” they say of the Deadpool gig. “Because it’s so different to anything I’ve done before. Increasingly I am striving to find in the roles I take on a sense of challenge. There is real excitement in delving into unknown waters. What a joy to be able to do that and be a part of this incredible ensemble. It’s been a real blast.”
Was there a moment when it really sank in that they were part of this monstrous machine?
“I think definitely the first day,” says Corrin. “It was a combination of me going in with a lot of impostor syndrome, and I was really scared to get there, and I had no idea what it would be like.”
Of course, the MCU itself hasn’t quite been like this before. The character of Deadpool has always slung around tasteless gags and self-referential putdowns. Now his patter will touch on shenanigans that surround the Disney corporation. We can expect jokes about the absorption of 20th Century Fox into the Disney empire. We will surely hear Deadpool wondering about the supposed family values that corporation lives by. The publicity surrounding Deadpool & Wolverine has made much of its supposed risqué quality. They would like us all to think they were taking the summer superhero movie into uncharted waters.
Did Levy and Reynolds meet any pushback from management? Did Kevin Feige, president of Marvel, ever veto any of the gags for taste?
“I really can’t stress this enough: I was shocked at the creative freedom that we had,” says Levy. “Every time we had a new draft to the script I would hand it in knowing there were at least 15 jokes that were potentially problematic, because we are poking great fun at the genre, at the studio, at the culture. Consistently. What we found was that if the jokes were funny, they stayed in with full Marvel support. So there was far less restraint and constraints than I expected on this project. It was really as much creative autonomy as I’ve had on any of my movies.”
From the day it became Deadpool and Wolverine, it became very easy to focus on the priority: one character and another character forced together. Conflict, comedy and then brotherhood
— Shawn Levy
There are all kinds of warnings around about revealing spoilers, but we can say that Wade Wilson, Deadpool’s alter ego, is dragged out of semiretirement to take on the usual existential threat with Jackman’s amiable spike-knuckled mutant – last seen in the sober Logan, from 2017. It seems as if there have been a host of proposed third episodes since the release of Deadpool 2 in 2018. “Before Disney bought Fox, Deadpool 3 was gonna be a road trip between Deadpool and Logan. Rashomon style. For real,” Reynolds tweeted in 2021, referencing an unlikely Akira Kurosawa film. Since then the surrounding chatter has been as much about the business side of Marvel as about what we must call “content”. One senses Levy wants to downplay that.
“The key was to not base any story on all of that bigger stuff,” he says. “Yes, we’re in the MCU. Yes, Disney bought Fox. Yes, there’s a legacy of Fox’s Marvel movies. And it was fun to use those aspects for humour, and for self-aware humour. But, from the day Hugh Jackman joined this movie – from the day it became Deadpool and Wolverine – it became very easy to focus on the priority. And the priority is one character and another character forced together. Conflict, comedy and then brotherhood.”
Levy is on a bit of a roll now.
“That is the north star of the movie,” he says. “And so everything else is rings of Saturn. I’m just using every metaphor today. I hope I’m getting extra points for metaphor. The core planet is Deadpool and Wolverine – and telling the story of these two antiheroes who find redemption with each other.”
Whatever you think about the Deadpool movies you would have to admit they have a different feel from the first tranche of Marvel films. That said, the franchise has been allowed to skew from the mapped-out path in recent years. Taika Waititi’s excellent Thor: Ragnarok and less successful Thor: Love and Thunder essentially play like comic parodies of the wider franchise. TV series such as WandaVision and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law made further experiments with genre. It is impossible to maintain homogeneity across an empire as vast as that which has developed since the release of Iron Man in 2008. That sort of innovation is required if Marvel is going to help cinema escape the Age of Uncertainty.
I wonder what Corrin made of this new world. Were they at home with the more profane comedy?
“What Ryan has always done with Deadpool from day one is to be beautifully subversive,” they say. “And I think he’s mainly taking digs at himself. He’s so self-flagellating in that way, it sets up this precedent that the jokes don’t mean harm. There’s no interrogation going on. There’s no judgment going on. It’s really playful. And it’s meant in good spirit. I think it’s really wonderful for people to be open to that kind of humour. Certainly, that’s what I felt as well.”
Some things remain the same. Some things change. Does it feel as if they are taking over a mantle from James McAvoy and Patrick Stewart, who played incarnations of Charles Xavier in earlier X-Men films? Obviously, Cassandra is a bad seed. But they’re all part of the same family.
“I went back and watched again Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy’s performances of Xavier,” they say. “And they portray that character with such nuance and such grace. There is so much integrity there. It was funny to then put the focus back to my role, where you are including elements of Xavier, but also you have to do the opposite, because of being the evil sister. It was really fun to choose what similarities I wanted to draw on and where I wanted there to be obvious differences.”
All of which may be enough to set the MCU back on an even keel. Deadpool & Wolverine arrives a week after the good-natured sequel to Twister. If those two can set late summer alight, the monks of doom may get to shelve their bells for a month or two. Feige and the rest of the management will then hold their breath until Captain America: Brave New World restarts Marvel engines in February. Nervy times.
Deadpool & Wolverine opens in cinemas on Friday, July 26th, with previews on Thursday, July 25th
