By the end of this weekend, “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the latest film from Disney’s recently beleaguered Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, will likely have surpassed $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. This success would seem to be a win for audiences that want both big franchise movies and adult content. Unlike most of Disney’s superhero movies, which are carefully engineered to appeal to the widest possible commercial audience (adults, children and international censors), the R-rated “Deadpool & Wolverine” is stuffed full of foul language, sex jokes and gore.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” is certainly not for kids. But I’d struggle to say that it’s for grown-ups either.
Disney’s newest superhero film features plenty of violence, bloody and relentless and eventually mind-numbing. The titular characters have healing powers that render them effectively invulnerable, and the combat is just an excuse for more jokes, so most of the violence achieves nothing emotionally. Similarly, filthy wisecracks abound, but there’s no actual sex in the movie — nothing that could create real emotional stakes. Meanwhile, the character of Deadpool, as played by Ryan Reynolds, is defined by his trademark meta patter, through which he constantly reassures the audience that what they’re watching shouldn’t be taken seriously. At its core, this new made-for-adults film is still just another big-budget franchise movie based on empty nostalgia and catering to childishness, if not children.
I know I’m not alone in finding the film’s fundamental nature distressing (one headline branded the movie “the year’s most depressing success story”) or in lamenting Hollywood’s broader abandonment of popular entertainment made for adults. For decades now, Americans have been living in a period of all-conquering artistic populism; our culture industry has fully absorbed the notion that there is no sin greater than snobbery when it comes to appreciation of music or movies or television. We’ve essentially gotten rid of the divide between children’s and adult entertainment, insisting that it’s perfectly fine — maybe even preferable — to have the same tastes as an adult that you had as a child. (Or, perhaps, the same tastes that your child currently has, given the size of the adult “Bluey” audience.)
If there’s been one dominant message in 21st-century American artistic culture, it’s that you have permission — permission to consume nothing but superhero movies, Barbie, pop music by a recent Disney Channel star; permission to never eat your cultural vegetables; permission to never expand your cultural palate or stretch your attention span.
This permission may seem freeing. But when paired with ruthless, profit-maximizing market forces, it’s contributed to the death of grown-up entertainment.
There are core aspects of the human experience that, I’m afraid, can’t be effectively captured in superhero stories. It’s unavoidably relevant that the narratives driving so many of these movies were developed by comic book creators who were producing stories written for children, marketed to children and sold to children. Yes, there have been comic books written for adults and comics with substantial adult readership — Deadpool, the character, has always been more adult, although he’s also been folded into more kid-friendly Marvel comics over the years. My favorite comic book run of all time, Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s “Elektra: Assassin,” is a brilliant mini-series that’s adult both in content and themes — touching on mental illness, anti-communism, toxic but passionate love and Reaganism. But the exceptions don’t change the fact that superhero movies — the bedrock of the modern Hollywood blockbuster — are pulling from stories that, in general, have a limited emotional, thematic and narrative palette.
Some will argue that I’m being reductive. After all, isn’t Batman’s origin story fundamentally one of trauma? Inspired to vigilantism by the senseless murder of his parents, Batman is the poster child for someone who could benefit from therapy. And isn’t the discrimination that mutants face in the X-Men comics a metaphor for racism and other real-world bigotries? Sure. But you have to acknowledge that genuinely adult content had to be hidden in metaphor (or dealt with in a shallow manner) in classic comic books. For many decades, they were constrained by the rules of the Comics Code Authority, a censorious organization established following a moral panic over comics in the 1950s and eventually abandoned by major comic book publishers in the 21st century. (The scaremongering book that prompted this panic was titled, ludicrously, “Seduction of the Innocent.”)
The only way to fix this situation is for audiences to demand films that not only portray sex and violence and other mature content, but also the thematic depth and narrative complexity that once were common at the movie theater. This isn’t as fanciful as it seems. Yes, the logic of Hollywood today is driven by risk aversion and a relentless search to maximize profits. But sophisticated adult dramas were once hugely profitable. It’s no surprise that erotic thrillers produced big grosses, such as 1987’s “Fatal Attraction” (second at the box office that year in the United States) or 1992’s “Basic Instinct” (ninth). But in 1993, the Tom Hanks-led “Philadelphia,” a movie about a man wasting away and dying from AIDS, grossed more than $440 million worldwide in inflation-adjusted dollars; in 1991, more than $311 million in 2024 dollars was made by “The Prince of Tides,” a movie about going to therapy to address childhood sexual assault. Just last year, the three-hour historical drama “Oppenheimer” ranked third in global revenues.
There’s no inherent reason that movies made for adults — not just in terms of raunchiness and violence, but also narrative and thematic complexity — can’t be big financial winners. But there’s a contemporary culture that is largely afraid to champion them. I worry that a well-intentioned desire to legitimize media and genres traditionally associated with children has led to a vast overcorrection, where the very idea of appropriate social pressure to embrace adult art is now frequently treated as a kind of discrimination.
It’s a shame that the burden of reinvigorating art for adults has to be carried by fans and critics, given that ultimately it’s the studios and their rapacious desire for the biggest possible audiences that got us here. But carry it we must; the studios aren’t going to grow up unless we force them to. Going to see adult movies in the future, supporting them financially, is an easy and direct way. More fraught, but perhaps necessary, would be to gently prod the adults around you who watch nothing but superhero and Harry Potter movies to expand their range — maybe to suggest, even, that they should feel a little embarrassed if they don’t. When we demolish any expectation that adults consume more difficult, less immediately pleasurable works of art, many people simply won’t do it, and they’ll find themselves starved for challenge and innovation in their media diet without knowing why.
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