[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Deadpool and Wolverine.]
One of the more hilarious moments of Deadpool & Wolverine (a movie that delivers a lot of hilarious moments) derives a lot of its power from how easily we’ve all forgotten the 2000s. Director Shawn Levy knows just how to play the reveal of Chris Evans as one of the film’s biggest cameos — first, a hooded figure in the wasteland of the Void, clearly of significance. Then, the reveal of Evans’ face, followed by the giddy realization that he’s about to say his iconic catchphrase…
“Flame on!”
For many casual superhero fans, Evans reappearing as Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four was a wild reminder of that strange footnote in the Captain America star’s career — despite Tim Story directing two films featuring Marvel’s First Family in 2005 and 2007, neither movie has managed to leave a lasting impact on pop culture.
The same might be said for a lot of the other projects produced by Fox featuring Marvel characters over the past few decades — there are as many bad X-Men movies as there are good ones, no one wants to talk about the 2015 Fantastic Four, and Ben Affleck’s Daredevil gave us Jennifer Garner’s Elektra and not much else.
Many of those Fox projects were launched prior to the ascent of Marvel Studios, when the company was just publishing comic books and licensing the screen rights to its characters. It’s always been fun to imagine the conversations that must have taken place in the 1990s and 2000s, between serious lawyers wearing serious suits, over which movie studio would get the rights to the B and C-tier characters associated with the big-name heroes: Maybe the most notable split occurred at fictional newspaper The Daily Bugle, when Sony got editor J. Jonah Jameson for its Spider-Man movies (played to universal acclaim by J.K. Simmons), while Fox got investigative journalist Ben Urich to investigate 2003’s Daredevil (and hey, Joe Pantoliano was solid in that film).
These sorts of negotiations remain a staple of the superhero film business: Prior to the Fox merger, a misunderstanding over the rights to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2‘s key villain led to a hasty trade between Disney and Fox, and even today Sony and Disney remain partners on Tom Holland’s Spider-Man adventures, with a new trilogy of films in the works according to producer Amy Pascal.
Disney acquiring Fox theoretically put an end to a lot of that horse-trading going forward, while opening the door to those Fox-owned characters being incorporated into the MCU. Yet one of the biggest complaints to be had with Deadpool & Wolverine is how it muddles the promise first introduced in the film’s Super Bowl commercial — that Deadpool, as “Marvel Jesus,” would provide the narrative-based justification for incorporating the Fox-owned properties into the existing MCU.
