Deadpool’s Latest Box Office Triumph Sheds Distressing Light on Modern Society

I’ve resented 20th Century Fox’s/Disney’s Deadpool franchise for quite a while now. These R-rated blockbusters are playing an outsized role in hijacking what should remain family-friendly fare — comic-book movies, for crying out loud! — and turning it into an increasingly sleazy product. Today’s kids are already hammered unrelentingly with cultural nastiness on nearly every front. Apparently, creatives are now placing the precincts of upstanding superhero-types in their putrid crosshairs. And contemporary cineastes are cheering it on.

It’s exasperating.

With the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, my disapproving — nay, disgusted — sentiments have gone through the roof like Iron Man breaking out of a skyscraper.

As commentator Larry Tomczak framed it,

[L]eave it to the progressive Left to ruin so much of what was basically wholesome and worth emulating. That’s what Disney and Marvel have done with the movie Deadpool and Wolverine.

Full disclosure: I don’t believe I’ve actually sat through any of the feature-length Deadpool-headlined films. I hardly want my ticket-buying dollars egging on this corrupting MCU trend. But I have seen enough Youtube-provided, uncensored clips from the flicks — oodles of them, truthfully — to confidently conclude they are, in fact, what film-goers (fans included!) claim: ambitiously profane, lewd, noxious.

Again, Tomczak, surveying Deadpool & Wolverine:

Amidst all the impossible superhero heroics, special effects, revved up LOUD music, wholesale violence, mass stabbings (with beheading and desecrating a corpse) there is ongoing rage, drunkenness and references to cocaine … amidst the mass killings in bizarre, futuristic, dark environments … [H]ow about an avalanche of profanity like 120 F-words … plus an almost nonstop tsunami of vile and sexually crude terms … Repeatedly, the Name of God is blasphemed and tragically the Name of Jesus is taken in vain.

Alas, just a few weekends ago this latest Deadpool offering depressingly crossed a milestone. It’s a striking one; an illuminative one. Collider.com’s Chris McPherson explains:

Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed The Passion of the Christ’s global box office earnings, taking its place on the top-grossing R-rated movies list. Marvel’s anti-hero duo has already raked in over $820 million, cementing their icon status. [D & W has since more than surpassed one-billion dollars in earnings and become the most successful R-rated film ever.]

Back in 2004, Passion’s receipts were just over $612 million worldwide. Accounting for inflation, that would total over one billion in 2024 bucks; but, as noted above, Deadpool/Wolverine has now eclipsed even that haul in both nominal and inflation-adjusted terms. The cut-to-the-chase result? The exploits of a sewer-mouthed mutant/mercenary and his nearly equally gutter-tongued, adamantium-enhanced co-belligerent have financially overtaken director Mel Gibson’s magisterial account of the Savior’s crucifixion.

Salt in the wound, the movie’s plot weaves in a number of irreverent — blasphemous? — quips about or allusions to the above-mentioned Messiah. At one point, Deadpool even jests, “I’m the Marvel Jesus.”

Playing on that, McPherson puckishly observes, “Marvel Jesus is officially more popular around the world than the exalted Son of God at the worldwide box office.”

Ouch. And yikes. The writer may not realize how ominously revelatory that gibe is.

A profanity-packed post-credit scene featuring Chris Evans — not in his signature Captain America role but reprising, instead, his less-well-known turn as “Johhny Storm” (aka, the “Human Torch”) from 2005/2007’s Fantastic Four releases — is particularly off-the-chain.

Shawn Levy describes it as “one of the great dirty monologues in the history of cinema.” Macpherson elaborates: It’s “a hilariously raunchy monologue” and an “unexpected and risqué cameo”.

Mind you, the cinematic material that precedes this concluding sequence tracks along similarly feculent lines: f-bombs galore, inventive combos of same with other scalding vulgarities, salacious, sex-saturated dialogue. It’s undeniably gross — and, to be clear once more, it’s all gallingly yoked to what is supposed to be a genre that conventionally draws moms, dads and their little ones/teens.

Too many entertainment industry adults simply couldn’t resist indulging their sordid interests, sentimentally channeling their own potty-mouthed childhoods — and so, befouling the literal childhoods of today’s kids. This gaggle of grown-up Tinsel Towners and film aficionados want to talk dirty, coarsely, excrementally and so … hello Deadpool films!

Comic book-oriented cinema is, thus, incrementally becoming yet another patch of modern society one can no longer assume safe for young people. Or, for all that, for adults in search of some diverting big-screen enjoyment which doesn’t slime them with offensiveness.

Has there recently been a more apt metaphor for twenty-first-century Western Civilization’s downward plummet than D & W’s box-office conquest of The Passion of the Christ? It’s not that society and pop culture were simon-pure two decades back. It was, however, pretty cool back then, even a bit heartening for many of us, that a major production focused on a sacred topic — millions would contend THE sacred topic — could score critical paeans and gargantuan, record-breaking profits in movie-dom.

This summer on the other hand? Worldwide theater-goers empowered a putrescent superhero actioner-comedy to elbow piety aside.

Additionally, along with boffo earnings, Deadpool & Wolverine are collecting rapturous reviews: a 95% positive “audiences rating” on Rotten Tomatoes, for instance. I can’t help but wonder how many Christ-professing, Bible-toting Christians flocked to their local Cineplex on Saturday afternoon or evening and forked over hard-won dollars to endorse this polluted and polluting Hollywood affair … only to show up in church Sunday morning to hear about God’s holiness and His sublime standards for living.

When superhero fun transmogrifies into superhero filth, righteous folks, responsible folks, need to send a message: Not Okay! We Object! We withhold our support!

As long as decent people, parents, those who complain about the culture’s degrading and deadening condition don’t do that? As long as they remain indifferently silent or even keep responding favorably to phenomenon like this freshest entrant in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Filmmakers will keep churning out its ilk … and worse.

Depend on it.