Be warned, Marvel fans – Deadpool & Wolverine is using you

The comic book movie is cameos galore with everyone from Channing Tatum to Henry Cavill popping in to say hello. In the wake of its star’s latest tweets, it’s looking increasingly like the film was used to test the waters for potential sequels. Gambit spin-off anyone? asks Annabel Nugent

(Jay Maidment)

Marvel is back – ostensibly. Following a run of box-office duds and Disney+ series that few people seemed to watch or care about, the superhero-centric movie studio has resurrected itself with Deadpool & Wolverine. In its first week of release, the film (a second sequel to 2016’s Deadpool) banked half a billion dollars and nudged the Marvel Cinematic Universe across the $30bn (£23.6bn) threshold.

Together with X-Men darling Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Ryan Reynolds’s saucy, smutty Merc with a Mouth has given the ailing MCU some much-needed CPR. The film’s biggest selling point wasn’t Reynolds, however, or even the return of Jackman, who had supposedly retired the character in 2017. No, the secret to Deadpool’s success – and perhaps the future success of the whole MCU – may well be its huge roster of cameos. Across two hours, there are dozens of cameos, ranging from the mass-appeal names your granny will recognise to the uber niche: Chris Hemsworth as Thor; Chris Evans as Fantastic Four’s Human Torch; Jennifer Garner as Elektra; Wesley Snipes as Blade. The list goes on. And on… But while all are relatively fleeting, I’d wager not all are frivolous.

If you want to predict the future of the MCU, just take a look at the call sheet for Deadpool & Wolverine. The film’s revolving door of actors has offered Marvel a unique (and well-timed) opportunity to brainstorm more revenue streams– spin-offs, sequels, and so on. Nowhere is this focus-group approach more evident than in the film’s handling of Gambit (Channing Tatum), the card-flinging X-Men mutant whose own dedicated spin-off movie landed Tatum as its prospective star back in 2014. (The Gambit project spent half a decade in production limbo, before it was shelved amid the 2019 Fox-Disney merger.) The character’s role in the film feels akin to a screen test or chemistry read. It’s easy to imagine a hive of office drones at Marvel headquarters painstakingly monitoring social media reactions to every surprise appearance, tallying up the number of cheers per cameo. If the response online is anything to go by, a new Tatum/Gambit film is a very real possibility.

As if to make this explicit, Reynolds threw his support behind such an idea in a tweet this week. “Gambit was a guy Chan was born to play,” declared Reynolds in a two-paragraph post that is both an outpouring of love and admiration for his onscreen pal, and a nakedly commercial test balloon for a potential Gambit spin-off. “He’s one of the coolest, smartest characters in Comics and still largely unexplored,” he continued. “I want more – and from what I saw in theatres, you do too.” He stopped just short of tagging MCU boss Kevin Feige.

Marvel has precedent on this sort of thing, of course: when Kathryn Hahn’s witchy villain achieved online virality in the 2021 Disney+ series WandaVision, the studio rushed to commission Agatha All Along, a still-forthcoming spin-off. And it’s not just Gambit. Reynolds has voiced similar advocacy behind Snipes, whose Blade looked much the same in Deadpool & Wolverine as he did in 1998 – only a little greyer, and even cooler. Proclaiming Snipes’s vampire slayer a “Marvel Daddy”, Reynolds implored fans to “retweet for a Logan-like send-off” – an allusion to the acclaimed and elegiac 2017 Wolverine sequel. The post has more than 85,000 retweets. (They even manage to work in a dig about that other Blade reboot, starring Mahershala Ali, which has been stuck in development hell for five years and counting.)

Another potential litmus test: Henry Cavill’s Wolverine. In one early scene in Deadpool & Wolverine, the Man of Steel star is seen playing a Wolverine variant. It’s not as odd as it first seems. The moment brings to life the long-swirling online chatter and fan fiction that have proposed Cavill as Jackman’s perfect replacement. Could this have been Cavill’s engine-revving, cigar-puffing test drive? “They put his cameo to check how the audience will react and now we know the response is unanimously positive for Cavillrine,” said one post on Twitter/X. (I’d wager there’s a Cavill-Wolverine post waiting in Reynolds’s Twitter/X drafts as I write this very sentence.) Ditto Dafne Keen who, judging by the temperature on social media right now, could well have a Disney+ series heading her way, reprising her role as Logan’s mini-Wolverine clone, X-23.

In his Twitter/X thread, Reynolds hinted at a difference between some cameos and others. “Having the chance to say goodbye to some of these heroes is as important as having new characters to root for,” he wrote, effectively dividing the cameos into two categories: heroes saying goodbye, and characters for audiences to root for (in new movies perhaps?). Tatum, Reynolds wrote, fits squarely in the second camp.

Obviously, some cameos were simply intended to be a fun throwback. Reynolds’s tribute to Garner’s Elektra, for example, seems to place the character in that “heroes to say goodbye to” group, bearing none of the call-to-action energy of his previous posts. It reads more like a eulogy than anything else: “I love her and I will now and always, owe her one. Five. What a baller. #ElektraForever.

Gambit is a guy Chan was born to play. His story is similar to mine in that he spent a decade trying to put the most comic-accurate version of Gambit on the big screen. Remy LeBeau is grafted to his soul and needs to come out and deal. And Gambit found his author in Chan. He’s… pic.twitter.com/9Hz7qbZ85S

— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) August 5, 2024

For what it’s worth, Reynolds has elsewhere denied the idea that Deadpool & Wolverine was conceived as a dry run for future superhero flicks. In a recent interview with Collider, he claimed there had been no talk, or even a whisper, of a follow-up to the film, Deadpool-focused or otherwise. “This movie was made as a complete experience, It wasn’t meant to be a commercial for another movie,” he told the publication. Uh-uh.

But Deadpool himself is proving absurdly, record-breakingly lucrative. So much so, that it’s near impossible not to read Reynold’s latest comments – “I have no idea if I’ll ever wear that Deadpool suit again” – without scoffing. There is no way audiences have seen the last of the Regenerating Degenerate, for the simple fact that he has made too much money to disappear. Reynolds may as well stay permanently zipped in the costume for all the time he’ll spend wearing it in the coming years. Odds are you’ll see him sooner rather than later – quite possibly opposite Robert Downey Jr in the recently unveiled Avengers flick.

It is admittedly an apt business move to use Deadpool & Wolverine as an opportunity to spitball new ideas – maybe it’ll even lead to fans getting what they want – but you just can’t escape the smack of cynicism. It’s at least a cynicism the film itself is more than happy to cop to. And it does, countless times. Marvel and Disney’s capitalist greed is pretty much the punchline of the whole movie, referenced ad nauseam in meta moments wryly spoken by Reynolds himself. Regardless, the focus group has worked. Tatum, Snipes, Cavill: the people have spoken. Spin-offs assemble.

‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is out in cinemas now