Deadpool and Wolverine are bound to be some of the most popular Halloween costumes of the year, so it’s only appropriate that the movie has launched a new TV spot, reminding people that it’s still in theaters as the spooky season approaches. In the new ad, Marvel teases the wide variety of spooky characters the movie has in store, right up to reminding you that it’s got “vampires” — cut to a shot of Wesley Snipes as Blade. While theatrical windows seem to be getting shorter all the time, Deadpool & Wolverine has remained on the big screen nonstop since its release in July, playing concurrently with its home release and continuing to pass new box office benchmarks all the time.
Most recently, Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed Barbie, last year’s highest-grossing film, to take #12 on the list of all-time highest-grossing blockbusters at the domestic box office. It has taken less than 90 days for the movie to rack up $636 million in North America and more than $1.3 billion worldwide.
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The foul-mouthed buddy comedy brought back Hugh Jackman for his last “one last ride” as Wolverine — unless there’s a sequel! — and reunited him with Ryan Reynolds, who admitted that after Disney acquired Fox, he wasn’t sure whether he would ever get to make a third Deadpool film. The movie was directed by Stranger Things and Free Guy veteran Shawn Levy.
You can see the TV spot below.
The movie has been a breath of fresh air after a few rocky years for Marvel Studios in particular and superhero movies more broadly. With few exceptions, most comics adaptations have been performing like like Madame Web and Joker: Folie a Deux than Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 and Deadpool & Wolverine. The box office as a whole has been struggling, with a number of reliable tentpole franchises starting to show their age. Besides the stumbling Marvel monolith, series like Mission: Impossible and Transformers have had some pretty high-profile disappointments in the years since Hollywood’s brief, pandemic-related shutdown.
Deadpool & Wolverine, like Guardians, also managed to draw rave reviews from critics, lending some credibility to James Gunn’s long-held philosophy that people aren’t tired of superhero movies — they’re tired of lazy, uninspired superhero movies, and if you make a good one, they’ll show up for it.
“People say ‘superhero fatigue,’ but I think that you see now that’s not a real thing,” Gunn said shortly after he was tapped to take over DC Studios. “People are fatigued with repetition. I don’t think it’s just superhero movies; I think you’re seeing it now in spectacle films in general…there’s a lot of spectacle films made, and they just have gotten really generic and they’ve gotten boring, and they’re not about characters, and there’s no emotion.”