Ending a Cinematic Universe

With no "new beginning."

Deadpool and Wolverine is breaking box-office records, proving that there’s life left in the superhero film genre, a few years after some observers were ready to write it off. But it does so by claiming there’s life left in certain superhero movies that you probably should write off. (Some spoilers follow.)

The plot dances between a straightforward superhero adventure—or as straightforward as a romp through multiple alternate universes can get—and the kind of snarky metacommentary that the other Deadpool movies only put in the margins.

A few years ago, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was the envy of all Hollywood—but to comics fans, it was an incomplete creation. The Fox Entertainment Group had the film rights to many Marvel comics characters—including Deadpool—and used them to make “Marvel films” that were not by Marvel Studios, like the first two Deadpool films. (And there's a separate issue with Sony and Spider-Man characters, but let’s keep this simple.)

Since then, Disney’s purchased Fox outright, and the Fox movie characters are likely to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe—many played by new actors—or be forgotten. But even as “Fox Marvel” has become a memory, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has stumbled into a string of box-office failures, critical and commercial. It’s still light-years ahead of its remaining competition but in need of course-correction.

This is the backdrop that informs the latest film, and the movie 100% commits to commenting on it.

Deadpool is given an opportunity to join the Avengers, to “matter”—but only in another universe. His own is slated to be wiped from existence. Deadpool prevents this. It seems like he’ll live happily ever after, and the movie holds out hope that so will the allies he made along the way—allies who, like Deadpool himself, were “Fox Marvel” characters when there were Fox movies.

Deadpool and Wolverine is thus a celebration of those “other Marvel” films, the ones outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper: especially Blade, Elektra, Fantastic Four, and Logan. (Also joining the party is Gambit, a Channing Tatum X-Men spinoff that spent years in development but was never made.) By rolling characters from those films together, the movie creates an alternative “cinematic universe”—one that its title characters seem to rescue from oblivion.

But Deadpool is somewhat aware of his fictional existence, so part of him knows the disturbing truth. There’s a new Blade and a new Fantastic Four in development with new lead actors. A Disney TV series rolled out a new version of Elektra. While these characters’ names might live on, these versions of the characters will probably have their stories end here.

And in Deadpool’s meta-aware reality, having your story end is more or less like having your life end. Deadpool doesn’t worry about his own demise, but he is anxious that he’ll amount to nothing if he can’t join the Avengers, and that yearning for purpose in his life is inseparable from a search for prominence in future films.

The superhero genre gets most of its conventions from comic books, where the story is meant to continue month after month. In that environment, cancellation is often seen as failure and a ticket to obscurity—even comics fans can only keep up with so many characters, after all.

And aren’t characters just constructs in their creators’ and audiences’ minds? If they fade from those minds, is that not death? (They say you die twice: once when you stop breathing, once when someone thinks of you for the last time.)

Scary stuff if you dwell on it, even if you question whether characters were ever really alive to die in the first place.

But we don’t really think of characters as dying when their movies end outside of cinematic universes. E.T. didn’t cease to exist when his spaceship left Earth, he went home with memories of the kindly humans who got him there and lived his best life. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester don’t disappear after their wedding day, they live on happily ever after—how else could Eyre be around to tell you “Reader, I married him”?

This is one aspect of fictional existence that even Deadpool’s knowing voice might have overlooked. It highlights the limits of corporate power. If a character is alive at the end of the story, they don’t end when the story ends—the viewer or reader writes an ending for them. We, not Marvel, fill in the blanks that any story must leave behind. The best happy endings are beginnings, brimming with possibilities for us to imagine even after a “cinematic universe” is done.