Deadpool 3 has to pay for X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s sucking sin

On an evening otherwise dominated by some mildly alarming MCU developments, patient Ryan Reynolds fans were in for a delightful surprise: the star is set to return for the long-awaited Dead Pool triquel, Release is planned for 2024. But that was only half the bombshell detonated in Reynolds’ video tweet on Tuesday night. Joining the titular Marvel anti-hero is an even less-anticipated, if perhaps more highly-anticipated, co-star: Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.

But it won’t be the first time these two characters have come face to face on the big screen. This highly dubious honor belongs to what may still stand as the most loathed and willfully forgotten installment in 20th Century Fox’s X-Men film series. dead pool 3 – or whatever its title is – has a chance to redeem the chaos and despair of 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

By 2006 with the release of the mediocre received X Men: The Last Stand, the initial Fox X-Men trilogy was underway, but the studio didn’t want to see a lucrative brand name die out anytime soon. There were plans for a series of prequel films detailing the origins of some of the franchise’s key mutants like Wolverine and Magneto, as well as new fan-favorite faces like Gambit.

Image: Fox of the 20th century

As it turns out, this was never much: Magneto’s story was partially adapted into an eventual prequel/reboot of the X-Men films themselves, while the Gambit film remained in limbo almost until the moment Fox ceased being an independent studio to be . But with Jackman on board for a new movie series, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was loose. And it didn’t take long for viewers and filmmakers to regret it.

The basic story premise is solid enough. Co-written by honest Hollywood screenwriter David Benioff (before becoming a game of Thrones showrunner) and Skip Woods (also a person who owned a word processor), the film follows the story of young James Howlett, who breaks away from a 19th-century Canadian hillbilly thanks to the conspiring military project Weapon X.

That’s a backstory that has plenty of comic street credibility, and in the context of the film, it enables what should, in theory, have been some fun cameos from other mutant recruits on the project turning Wolverine into an adamantium-infused operative. There’s Liev Schreiber as Sabretooth, Daniel Henney as Agent Zero (better known as Maverick to all his ’90s comic book reader fans), Kevin Durand as Fred Dukes’ enduring fat-phobic icon, and, most memorable of all, Ryan Reynolds making his debut as Wade Wilson, the hilarious assassin known here simply as Weapon XI.

Except for the small thing that he only gets it smart for about a single scene. Thereafter, origins seems to reschedule everything that comics readers love about Deadpool, and perhaps leave it entirely on the film reels of another film. Reynolds’ transformation into a replacement version of the all-powerful mercenary is a sight to behold. Gone is the iconic red and black costume, replaced with a combination of red pajama bottoms and a bare torso painted over in black permanent marker, an ensemble that can best be described as fraternity prank chic.

Image: Fox of the 20th century

His powers, in an apparent attempt to trump Jackman’s iconic metal claws, now include laser eyes and full swords sticking out of his hands. The film’s most notorious and inexplicable decision was to sew up Reynolds’ mouth shut, mouth the mercenary with every mouth that could be talked about, and oblige the actor to play the rest of his role in absolute silence.

The result is that the crucial match between Jackman and Reynolds plays out like a master class in over-emotional pantomime. Faced with the dual challenge of conveying an attempt at humor without dialogue or lips of any kind and conveying expression with giant kitchen knives on his wrists, Reynolds opts for a mustache-twirling performance style that only Willem Dafoe in full Green Goblin armor could love could. However, to do justice to Deadpool’s comedic potential, one has to admit that this entire sequence is ridiculously funny.

Image: Fox of the 20th century

Image: Fox of the 20th century

Image: Fox of the 20th century

Image: Fox of the 20th century

“Oh oh! Oh, ah. Uhhh. uh oh um, uh oh…”

But it would (fortunately) not last. When Reynolds returned to the role of his own star vehicle seven years later, it had been rebooted both physically and narratively, coming much closer to the Marvel Universe model fans had longed for from the start.

Which, when it comes down to it, might be the best reason to dig up this chapter of Deadpool’s sad cinematic past in the next installment. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a product of another era in superhero movies: a time when capes, costumes, and primaries were viewed with cynical detachment, and when these newsprint characters’ seedy beginnings were advertised as more of an embarrassment than a selling point.

As the MCU gravitates more towards the multiverse as a place to revisit the tombstones of franchises past — be it Patrick Stewart’s Professor X or a slew of actors from the discarded Spider-Man franchises of yesteryear — there are those Opportunity to make amends, in a subtle but decisive way, for a cultural moment when superheroes still carried a touch of nerdy shame.

With Hugh Jackman in the cast, the next Deadpool movie has a chance to rise X-Men Origins: Wolverine into the campy spectacle it always should have been, even if it never knew it would. Finally, if we as a people have found it in our hearts to love Joel Schumacher, we can also learn to love this film.