'Deadpool & Wolverine's $444M Debut Shows Why Marvel's Recent Box Office Woes Can't Be Pinned on the Multiverse

It's easy to blame Marvel's post-Endgame struggles on a single element, but the truth is a complicated mix of outside circumstances and changing audience tastes.

Here’s the good news: Deadpool & Wolverine just opened with a sky-high $211 million domestic and $444 million worldwide opening frame (above even the $441 million global launch for Avatar: The Way of Water). That’s the sixth-biggest domestic and 11th-biggest global debut ever, the top R-rated launch by far and the third-biggest launch for a film featuring Jon Favreau. It’ll pass the entire (unadjusted) domestic totals of any non-Deadpool X-Men movie by today or tomorrow (sorry to The Last Stand and Days of Future Past). The superhero movie is not “dead.” It’s merely more execution-dependent than in 2010s. Audiences show up when you make The Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. However, offerings like Shazam: Fury of the Gods and The Marvels will no longer cut it.

Here’s the bad news: The Deadpool franchise is, like Guardians and Black Panther, so popular among general audiences that a decline in interest in the MCU or DC does not impact it. And all three of them may be ending/have ended (Black Panther is a complicated situation). The poor showings of (COVID and SAG-AFTRA strike variables notwithstanding) The Marvels, Eternals and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania show that the MCU is no longer such an A-level vacation destination that audiences will show up for a fun-looking sci-fi swashbuckler featuring characters they’ve never heard of just because it’s a Marvel movie. The narrative is that their woes (comparatively speaking) have been due to an overreliance on the multiverse, to the point where Deadpool &Wolverine has an onscreen rant about precisely that. However, Deadpool 3’s success debunks that “excuse.”