You know exactly which movie is dicing up its little brother, Tim Allen, and Donald Trump on streaming

back in the weeks and days leading up to the end of July when you couldn’t so much as gaze at a pixel without getting a face full of Ryan Reynolds in red spandex or Hugh Jackman looking obscenely angry?

Well, that was because the marketing for Deadpool & Wolverine was hot to the touch at the time, and as the MCU’s only theatrical release of 2024, Marvel wanted you to be unreasonably aware of this movie’s existence. Needless to say, their wish came true, as the film wound up snagging over $1.3 billion at the box office, and is now sitting smugly at the top of Disney Plus four months later, because of course it is.

Per FlixPatrol, Deadpool & Wolverine is soaring on the United States’ Disney Plus charts as the most-watched piece of media across the streamer’s entire library at the time of writing. Bowing down to its tongue-in-cheek might are the likes of its predecessor Deadpool (eighth place), a second-place The Santa Clause and its ninth-place sequel, and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in third place.

As if you even need to be told this by now, Deadpool & Wolverine stars Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, two slaughter-happy superheroes who painstakingly endeavor to prevent Deadpool’s universe from being swallowed by the Time Variance Authority. Along the way, they assemble a ragtag team of heroes from Marvel’s legacy slate of films in hopes of stopping the cutthroat Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) from imposing her will on the multiverse.

Deadpool & Wolverine is one of those films that knows exactly what it is, what it wanted to accomplish, and how it was going to accomplish that. In this way, there’s a certain degree of respect that must be reserved for it. Indeed, it dexterously demonstrates an understanding of the individual weight that every character carries in a non-diegetic sense, and the chemistry between Jackman and Reynolds seals at least some sort of deal.

What cannot be overlooked, however, is that Deadpool & Wolverine is the last thing that the superhero genre needed at this moment in time. Empathy and sincerity are key pillars in telling any story, and that has largely been lacking from Marvel’s library this last while; the further we move away from Endgame, the more insistent the canon seems on prioritizing brand recognition over character-driven storytelling, and the films and television shows are suffering harshly because of it.

Enter Deadpool, who rolls up on screen laughing about how poor of a job Disney has been doing as of late, and riding that snide irony all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, the film knows that all the cameos are going to sell it for a vast majority of its fanbase to the point where they don’t even have to be well-written in the context of the narrative.

Compare, for instance, the contrived pathos in X-23’s quieter moments with the genuine thematic heft offered by Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man: No Way Home, and then consider the fact that, either way, all the audience is thinking about is “the character I like from the thing that I liked in the past.” All this to say, here’s hoping a title like Captain America: Brave New World is an omen for what’s to come, even if Robert D0wney Jr.’s casting as Doctor Doom doesn’t inspire much hope there.