After comparing the box office results of ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home, I’m even more impressed by the 2024 MCU movie. ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine is one of the more unconventional MCU movies in recent history – a concept that perhaps suits the unusual antihero at the heart of it. Featuring a cast of returning Fox characters – and Hugh Jackman as a variant of his iconic Wolverine – the movie brings the Fox film world into the MCU multiverse, and sees ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool team up with this new version of Wolverine to try and rescue it from certain doom.
The subsequent success of this story has essentially been celebrated ever since, as the movie pulled off a premise that could have easily fallen flat and sabotaged more than one Marvel movie universe if it had done so. With that said, ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine‘s box office results are so major that it’s easy to miss the scale of its success – and why said success is so notable for the franchise – without doing something like comparing the film to other MCU movies that have also had some serious financial success.
ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine’s Box Office Was A Major MCU Win
ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine’s Box Office Hold A Major Spot In The MCU Rankings
While the ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool series has had relatively consistent box office success, bringing ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool into the MCU for ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine – even if it was only in terms of the MCU multiverse for the most part, rather than being set in the main MCU world – still had elements of a gamble. Ryan Reynolds’ ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine are two of the stronger stars in Marvel’s movie history, but not every movie they’ve been in has been regarded as quite the successes that the likes of Logan or ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool were – as indeed Reynolds’ ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine was initially lambasted.
With a new iteration that stayed far closer to the wise-cracking source material, ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool proved consistently popular, and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine has long remained one of the biggest heroes in the entirety of superhero movie history. While this suggested combining them could be a recipe for major success, it also hinted that any subpar results could leave an unfortunate mark on a slew of successful and critically appreciated films, which raised some worries based on the MCU’s more divided results following Avengers: Endgame.
However, ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine arguably exceeded expectations, both in terms of critical and commercial success. The MCU movie netted itself a $1.3 billion worldwide box office (as per The Numbers), giving it the 6th biggest box office in the franchise thus far, and making it the first MCU movie to have made over $1 billion since Spider-Man: No Way Home three years before in 2021. In fact, comparing the two trilogy conclusions more directly arguably makes ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine look even better, even though the Spider-Man movie has a higher box office.
Comparing ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine & Spider-Man: No Way Home’s Box Office Shows Just How Successful The R-Rated Movie Was
How Close ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine Came To Spider-Man: No Way Home’s Results Despite Its R-Rating Limiting Its Audience Is Notable
Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s worldwide box office is the third highest in the entire of the MCU timeline, coming only just behind Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War – which very much pushed the boundaries of what the superhero genre was capable of both story-wise and since both movies made over $2 billion each. Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s own box office comes very close to this mark, with its worldwide box office sitting at $1.92 billion (The Numbers) – a colossal feat given the Avengers movies drew from such a wide range of stories and tens of movies for its own results.
With these statistics in mind, the idea that ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine‘s box office results weren’t that far off the most successful non-Avengers movie in the franchise feels all the more impressive. This is doubly true when you add in the fact that, unlike any of these movies, ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine is an R-rated movie – which naturally limits its box office potential through its effect on a huge section of the audience that most other superhero movies draw from to get their own box office results.
Ultimately, the idea that ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine earned its place in the box office lineup of the MCU while also having a more limited prospective audience who would or could see it in cinemas really serves to underline just how noteworthy its box office results really are. Excitingly, the fact ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine pulled off this feat is not only good for the movie itself and the characters therein, but also for the future of the franchise itself going forward.
ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine And Spider-Man: No Way Home Paint A Promising Picture For The Franchise’s Potential After Avengers: Endgame
Following Avengers: Endgame, there have been sentiments that the MCU hasn’t been able to replicate some of its previous successes with later installments in the franchise. Until Spider-Man: No Way Home and ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine, this was ostensibly reflected in the box office results of the MCU, with Spider-Man: Far From Home‘s $1.1 billion results right after Avengers: Endgame and Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness‘ $952 million 2022 results (The Numbers) being some of the franchise’s most successful box offices until these releases.
ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s more recent successes underline that there’s still major critical and financial potential in the franchise, and that counting out the MCU when it can build on stories that have been set up for decades in some areas now may be underselling the franchise. That said, the two movies also show that the franchise could have major success with both more adult-orientated releases and releases that are more family-friendly in content and age ratings, helping reinforce the idea that the future in some ways looks wider for the MCU than ever before.
In fact, given there’s a fair chance of all three of ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool, Wolverine and Spider-Man appearing in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars – alongside the many other cameos already confirmed, and the no doubt many others we simply don’t know about yet – the movies’ success can also direct pave a way to these installments having greater results than they could have had otherwise. As such, the ways ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s critical and financial results can impact the franchise may not be over quite yet.
Upcoming MCU Movies
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Thunderbolts*
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The Fantastic Four: First Steps
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Avengers: Doomsday
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Spider-Man: Brand New Day
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Avengers: Secret Wars
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