Deadpool & Wolverine

• 1. Introduction

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  Deadpool & Wolverine almost went by a different name. In February 2024, a title leaked online: Deadpool & Friend. Ryan Reynolds later claimed it had been the real title at the time. Fans reacted badly, and the studio revealed the actual title the very next day.

  That near miss says something about a project that spent years failing to find its footing. Marvel Studios, Maximum Effort, and 21 Laps Entertainment produced the film, a sequel to Deadpool and Deadpool 2. Shawn Levy directed it from a script he wrote with Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells. Reynolds returns as the masked mercenary Wade Wilson, known as Deadpool. Hugh Jackman reprises Logan, the clawed mutant known as Wolverine, a role he had already said goodbye to.

  What convinced Jackman to put the claws back on? What actually happens when a wisecracking mercenary from one universe drags a reluctant variant of Wolverine into a fight to save it? And once the film reached theaters, how did audiences and critics respond? The chapters ahead trace the years it took to get this pairing on screen, the story that resulted, and what happened after release.

• 2. Inside The Multiverse Rescue

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  Wade Wilson is arrested at his own birthday party, six years after giving up his masked identity to sell used cars. The Time Variance Authority, an organization that watches over the multiverse, brings him before an agent named Mr. Paradox. Paradox explains that Wade's home, Earth-10005, is unraveling because its stabilizing anchor being has died: Logan, the man also known as Wolverine. Paradox offers Wade a place in the wider Sacred Timeline instead. Then he reveals a plan to speed up Earth-10005's collapse using a machine called the Time Ripper.

  Wade steals Paradox's TemPad device and travels to Logan's grave, hoping to bring him back. When that fails, he searches other universes for a substitute Wolverine variant. He returns with one Paradox calls the worst version in the multiverse. Realizing Paradox is acting without his superiors' knowledge, Wade and this new Logan are banished to the Void, a wasteland at the end of time.

  In the Void, the pair are captured by Cassandra Nova, the twin sister of X-Men leader Charles Xavier. She has struck her own deal with the TVA to oversee the wasteland. Cassandra kills Johnny Storm and leaves Wade and Logan to be devoured by a creature called Alioth, but they escape. Two Deadpool variants nicknamed Nicepool and Dogpool point them toward a resistance group already fighting Cassandra. That group, made up of Laura, Elektra, Blade, and Gambit, takes them in. Laura convinces Logan, who still regrets the deaths of his fellow X-Men, to join the fight.

  Cassandra is betrayed by her follower Pyro and nearly dies before Logan convinces Wade to spare her. She repays that mercy by opening a portal back to Earth-10005 and following them there. There, she summons an army of Deadpool variants and prepares to use the Time Ripper to erase every timeline but the Void. Wade and Logan destroy the machine together, a choice that could kill them both, and survive only by sharing the burden between them. Logan chooses to remain in Wade's universe once the threat is over, and encourages his friend to reconcile with his former partner Vanessa. Reaching that ending took the filmmakers years of failed attempts, until Jackman reached out to Reynolds in August 2022 and changed the plan entirely.

• 3. Getting Wolverine Back

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  Hugh Jackman had already said his goodbye to the character when Logan died in 2017, in the film named for him. Twentieth Century Fox began developing a third Deadpool film built around the team X-Force as early as November 2016. That script was meant to stay separate from a bigger planned team-up film. Reynolds later floated an idea for a Rashomon-style road trip movie featuring Jackman's Wolverine. Disney's 2019 acquisition of Fox put those Marvel-adjacent projects on hold.

  By October 2019, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was still unsure how to fold Deadpool, the X-Men, and mutants into the MCU. Feige advised Jackman against returning at all. He believed Wolverine's death in Logan was the greatest ending in the character's history and worried about undoing it. Writers Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin joined the project in November 2020. Shawn Levy signed on to direct in March 2022.

  In August 2022, Jackman reached out to Reynolds because he wanted back in. He had been content retiring the role for years. Still, he decided a team-up with Reynolds 'could be so much fun; I'll probably have more fun on that movie than anything I've ever done.' Feige was won over once he understood Jackman would play a new variant of Wolverine from another universe, not the character who died in Logan.

  Jackman wore a comics-accurate yellow and blue Wolverine costume for the first time in the role. The look was styled after the character's appearance in Astonishing X-Men, drawn by John Cassaday. It also folded in 1970s design elements by John Romita Sr. and Dave Cockrum, plus a 1990s design by Jim Lee. Jackman said putting on the suit 'looked so right and felt so right.' Wesley Snipes, meanwhile, hadn't played Blade since 2004's Blade: Trinity and assumed his time with the character was over.

• 4. A Home For Fox's Castoffs

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  Wesley Snipes hadn't played the vampire hunter Eric Brooks, known as Blade, since Blade: Trinity in 2004. He assumed the role was closed once Marvel cast Mahershala Ali as the MCU's Blade. He and Reynolds hadn't stayed in touch since that earlier film, where Snipes had struggled with Reynolds's sense of humor. Because Marvel could not legally use the character's leather coat from New Line's films, the production designed Snipes a new costume.

  Jennifer Garner returned as Elektra Natchios, the sai-wielding fighter she first played in 2003's Daredevil and its 2005 spin-off Elektra. She initially denied being involved when reports of her casting surfaced. Channing Tatum finally got to play Remy LeBeau, known as Gambit, a role he had once been attached to in an unproduced standalone Fox film. Chris Evans appears as Johnny Storm, the Human Torch from Fox's Fantastic Four films. His introduction is built to make audiences think he is reprising Captain America instead.

  Director Shawn Levy said the film's focus on legacy produced 'a who's who of discarded Marvel characters.' Robert Downey Jr. was asked to reprise Tony Stark alongside Jon Favreau's Happy Hogan, but turned the part down after reading the scene. Writers Reese and Wernick said he was the only actor to decline a role in the film. Deals could not be reached for Vinnie Jones and Jason Flemyng to return as Juggernaut and Azazel. Talks with Terry Crews about reprising Bedlam from Deadpool 2 went nowhere.

  Josh Brolin's Cable was considered too, but the writers held off. The film was built to honor characters who never got a proper send-off at Fox, and Cable had only just appeared in Deadpool 2. Giving so many characters a proper goodbye meant building entire worlds for them to say it in.

• 5. Building The Void

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  For the scene where Cassandra Nova kills Johnny Storm, visual effects supervisor Swen Gillberg's team studied the exhibit Bodies: The Exhibition. They added a comedic blink beforehand to soften the moment. Industrial Light & Magic handled 614 shots overall, most of them set in the Void.

  Framestore delivered 420 final shots, including a fight against an army of Deadpool variants built to look like one continuous take. That sequence relied on digitally duplicated crowds and detailed environment work. For the final confrontation with Cassandra and the Time Ripper, Framestore reused a spaghettification effect. It had first built that effect for the second season of Loki.

  Wētā FX, returning from the first two Deadpool films, expanded to roughly 630 shots on this one. That work included new animation for Wolverine's mask and a machine learning tool that suggested facial movements from reference footage Reynolds provided. Cassandra's arena was built from the corpse of a giant Ant-Man. Emma Corrin filmed scenes with an arm hidden so it could be replaced digitally, letting Cassandra's powers reach into other characters' faces.

  Because filming paused for months during a labor strike, some scenes were shot in summer and others in winter. Visual effects were used afterward to erase the difference. None of that engineered stillness had a soundtrack yet. Composer Rob Simonsen wasn't hired to fix that until mid-July 2023.

• 6. Music And Marketing

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  Rob Simonsen signed on to score the film by mid-July 2023. He had already worked with director Shawn Levy on The Adam Project and the fourth season of Stranger Things. Years earlier, in 2020 or 2021, Reynolds had pitched an action sequence set to Madonna's Like a Prayer. That idea eventually grew to include Wolverine as well as Deadpool. Reynolds and Levy met with Madonna to secure the rights, and she agreed on the condition that the song be paired with a gospel choir.

  A soundtrack album went digital through Hollywood Records on the 24th of July 2024, followed by a physical release two days later. It carried 17 songs plus Simonsen's original theme, titled LFG. A separate score album arrived the same day in standard and deluxe editions. Warner Records followed on the 9th of August 2024 with an EP built around Like a Prayer and its film remixes.

  Like a Prayer reached a much bigger audience during a Super Bowl LVIII teaser trailer in February 2024. That trailer racked up 365 million global views within 24 hours, beating Spider-Man: No Way Home's prior record of 355.5 million. Reynolds and Jackman received Guinness World Records certificates for the achievement on ITV's This Morning.

  Marketing leaned into spectacle elsewhere too. A popcorn bucket shaped like Wolverine's head, inspired by the viral bucket for Dune: Part Two, was unveiled in late May. A cast tour stopped in Shanghai, Seoul, Berlin, London, and Rio de Janeiro through July. Disney spent $135 million promoting the film alongside brand partners including Heineken, Coca-Cola, Xbox, and Reynolds's own Aviation Gin.

  By the time the film opened in theaters, all that promotion had primed audiences for a very specific kind of record-breaking.

• 7. Breaking Box Office Records

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  Deadpool & Wolverine premiered at the David H. Koch Theater in New York City on the 22nd of July 2024. It then rolled out across France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan on the 24th. Spain, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Australia followed on the 25th, before the film opened in the United States and China on the 26th. The Motion Picture Association gave it an R rating, the first for any MCU film.

  On its opening day in the United States and Canada, the film made $96 million. That included $38.5 million from Thursday night previews, both records for an R-rated release. Its opening weekend brought in $211.4 million domestically and $444.6 million worldwide, the biggest opening ever for an R-rated film. It was also the sixth-biggest domestic opening of all time. The film recovered its reported $200 million production budget within two days.

  It kept setting single-day R-rated records through its first week. It made $24.4 million on a Monday, $25.3 million on a Tuesday, $19.3 million on a Wednesday, and $18 million on a non-preview Thursday. The film crossed $1 billion worldwide in its third weekend, only the second film to do so in 2024. That same weekend, Reynolds's film and Blake Lively's It Ends With Us held the top two box office spots. That feat had not happened for a married Hollywood couple since Bruce Willis's Die Hard 2 and Demi Moore's Ghost in 1990.

  Alien: Romulus bumped the film to second place in its fourth weekend. It returned to first place for its fifth and sixth weekends and stayed in the domestic top ten for eleven weeks total. It finished as the second-highest-grossing film of 2024, behind Inside Out 2, and the 20th-highest-grossing film of all time at release. Its final worldwide gross reached $1.338 billion.

  Tax filings later revealed a gross production cost of $533.7 million, against an initial public estimate of $200 million. Tax credits brought the net cost down to $429 million, still among the most expensive films ever made. Deadline Hollywood calculated a net profit of $400 million, the third-highest of any 2024 release.

  None of those numbers said anything about whether the people reviewing the film actually liked it.

• 8. A Divided Critical Verdict

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  On Rotten Tomatoes, 77 percent of 421 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average score of 6.9 out of 10. The site's consensus credited Reynolds with acerbic wit and said Jackman gave the film an Adamantium backbone. Metacritic, weighing 58 critics, landed at 56 out of 100, calling the reception mixed or average.

  Audiences disagreed with that split. CinemaScore polling gave the film an average grade of A, matching the previous two Deadpool films. PostTrak surveys found 96 percent of viewers gave it a positive score, and 85 percent said they would recommend it.

  Deadline's Pete Hammond said the pairing 'works your wildest screen-team dreams' and called Jackman's performance his best turn yet as Wolverine. Empire's Olly Richards praised a film with 'a million dick jokes' for still landing 'a character arc that's genuinely moving.' The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney said the meta humor was 'dialed up to radioactive levels' and called it the sturdiest part of the film.

  Not every critic was won over. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw found Reynolds 'periodically entirely unbearable' even while conceding he was often funny. The Los Angeles Times's Katie Walsh pushed back against the very references and fourth-wall breaks other reviewers had praised.

  That critical split didn't slow the film's momentum once it left theaters. When Deadpool & Wolverine reached Disney+ that November, Disney reported 19.4 million global views in its first six days. That made it the most-watched live-action film on the platform since Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's release in early 2023.