Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox last month shook up the landscape of the film industry and has left us with a lot of questions about how Marvel Studios might be planning on integrating Fox’s superheroes into the MCU. Since the X-Men franchise has been chugging along for 18 years now, integrating this current core of mutants into the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be pretty jarring.
However, if the studio doesn’t want to reboot the whole thing, they can always use some kind of comic book nonsense to explain the integration. Doctor Strange could open a portal to a parallel universe or something along those lines. In a universe that features talking raccoons and sorcerers, this isn’t really a stretch.
While bringing in the X-Men would require the filmmakers to work a bit of an explanation into the story, there is one Fox-owned Marvel character that would be able to explain it himself: Deadpool. This would be a bit of a gamble since while the first Deadpool film was a big hit, its R-rating kept a lot of the younger kids who tend to watch Marvel movies away.
It would be pretty amazing to see Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool show up out of the blue in a Spider-Man movie, but there are some hurdles in the way of that actually happening. While the ten-year-old kid demographic probably isn’t going to complain about the continuity errors this would bring up, they might be curious about this character whose movies they aren’t allowed to watch. This raises a pretty big question: will Marvel be able to bring Deadpool into the MCU without watering him down?
Disney CEO Bob Iger
has previously said the studio will be able to figure out a way to keep Deadpool an R-Rated character, but this will be much easier to do when dealing with his solo movies. Bringing him into PG-rated MCU films will be a bit more challenging. It’s been suggested before that Deadpool could still be his crass self in a more family-friendly way—all it would take is for the film editors
to bleep out his swear words. Deadpool could even complain about this censorship in the movie. This would be a pretty funny, and definitely meta, way of fitting the Merc with a Mouth into the MCU.
However, Marvel Studios might not be willing to fully embrace the absurdity of Deadpool in films that feature their more conventional characters. Introducing a fourth-wall-breaking, ultra-violent antihero isn’t exactly in keeping with the MCU formula. While I think the prospect of seeing Deadpool riff off of characters like Thor and Captain America is too good to pass up, having a character this crazy cross paths with the Avengers might be a bit too weird for the average moviegoer.
This leads me to a possible compromise. One way to avoid the risk of alienating Avengers fans who aren’t crazy about Deadpool would be to have some Avengers cameo in Deadpool movies, not the other way around. This would still let us see Wade Wilson make fun of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes without completely changing the tone of the Avengers movies. As far as the continuity goes, the Deadpool movies could be presented as stand-alone films, and I’m sure Kevin Feige could figure out a way to do this.
What’s your idea for bringing Deadpool into the MCU? Sound off below?