Deadpool charmed the pants off 20th Century Fox, and now they’re wooing him for their future X-Men movies. On Wednesday, the company announced it was planning a complete reboot and reimagining of the X-Men cinematic universe. In addition to resetting the timeline, Fox plans on embedding Deadpool into its storylines and not the shitty version of Deadpool we all saw in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but the vivacious, bloodthirsty version that debuted in Deadpool. This is astoundingly good news.
Though not every installment in the collection was bad, no one can call Fox’s X-Men franchise consistent. At their most resonant, Fox’s X-Men stories focus on their most unique, complex and offbeat characters: Beast, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Mystique, and to some extent, Jean Grey. When the franchise focused too heavily on stilted romances — Cyclops and Jean, Jean and Wolverine, Mystique and Beast — it lost steam in billows, often halting mid-movie with its stakes too low.
Yeah, we went there. All the romances in the X-Men movies lack chemistry.
Villain after irredeemable villain popped up to create a swirling death whirlpool in the sky, and Magneto seemed to start each movie with the same problem: loving Charles and hating non-mutants, unsure if he leaned good or evil. Introducing Deadpool, a chaotic neutral force of nature, into a new X-Men universe, will shock the franchise’s system and introduce new, vibrant complications. What happens if a mutant or superhuman rejects Professor X’s ideals, but isn’t quite evil? How will Magneto and Charles treat Deadpool, a man as unpleasant as Wolverine, but even less inclined to protect the weak?
Though it’s a shame that property rights still make fun-loving cinematic team-ups like Spider-Man and Deadpool highly unlikely, Marvel fans will get one step closer to catharsis when Wade Wilson is fully able to comment on, and fuck with, the X-Men universe’s full array of characters. The purpose of any superhero franchise, above all, is delivering bombastic, larger-than-life enjoyment to its audience, and Deadpool’s ticket sales prove that he’s capable of that satisfaction like no other character Fox currently owns.
