Allow me to take you back to the summer of 2000.
It was a new millennium. Athletes were gearing up for the Summer Olympics in Sydney. George Bush and Al Gore were each vying for the presidency. Sony had just launched the Playstation 2. And a little film studio called 20th Century Fox adapted a humble Marvel comic book series for film with the release of X-Men.
Ok, so Fox wasn’t exactly little. And “humble” is one of the last words I would choose to describe the X-Men comic series or the films that followed. The first movie alone grossed $296 million, becoming the ninth highest-grossing film of 2000 and launching a franchise that has since grossed more than $6 billion worldwide.
The only problem was that audiences had to wait three years before Fox gave them more.
X2: X-Men United was released in 2003, along with Daredevil and Universal Pictures’ Hulk. But audiences had to wait another two years before Fantastic Fourcame out in 2005 and another year after that for X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006.
But then, Marvel Studios began the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the release of Iron Man in 2008. Over the next 11 years (and a buyout by Disney), an additional 22 films were released, concluding “The Infinity Saga” (Marvel’s method of categorizing the release of its films) with Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019.
The X-Men franchise didn’t slack off during that period though. Fox still owned the rights to it. And the studio produced 12 more of their own Marvel films, including the Deadpoolfranchise, before they were acquired by Disney themselves in 2019.
The pandemic briefly shut things down in 2020. But by 2021, Marvel was back at it, releasing WandaVisionon Disney+ to introduce “The Multiverse Saga.” Since then, nine more series have been added, along with 11 films, the latest of which is Deadpool & Wolverine.
You might be wondering why I’ve cataloged this 21st-century litany of superhero films. Here’s why. If you’ve been paying attention, some quick math tells us that since Phase One of the MCU began, we’ve gotten roughly 1.8 films per year. Some years only had one movie (2009 had none), but recently, we’ve become accustomed to about 3-4 every year.
Not so in 2024. This year, the only Marvel movie that audiences will be treated to is Deadpool & Wolverine. And it’s rated R. And it’s a hard R at that.
When Fox still held the keys to the Deadpool franchise, that restricted rating wasn’t such a big deal. Deadpool and the X-Men weren’t officially part of the MCU. So you didn’t need to see their films to know what was happening in the “Infinity Saga” or even (up to this point) the “Multiverse Saga.”
But now parents are faced with a pretty difficult decision. In the past, each MCU film has been rated PG-13. And except for Logan, each of the X-Men films have been rated PG-13, too. And while the superhero franchises might have been nonstarters for some families, most could take their teenagers to see the movies without worrying too much about really explicit content.
That’s no longer the case. With the induction of the third Deadpool flick into the MCU, audiences who want to keep up with the larger storyline will need to know what happens in Deadpool & Wolverine. Which means that they’ll be exposed to a smorgasbord of content ranging from “raunchy, ribald and sexually suggestive humor” to vulgar, visually suggestive sight gags to “enough bloodletting to make Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill envious.” Oh, and not to mention foul language (f-bombs alone pushed the tally into triple digits).
Discerning families may be able to convince their kids to read a plot summary online. (Though even that could be risky since many summaries may contain some of those gritty, explicit details.) But that won’t change the fact that Deadpool & Wolverine is going to be just about everywhere you turn this summer.
The sheer number of cameos alone is going to be a huge draw for fans of the previous X-Men, Fantastic Four and MCU films. Add in the cultural popularity of the film’s title characters and fourth wall-breaking winks at MCU lore, and you can bet it’ll be all over social media and teenagers’ text threads.
And that’s where the difficulty as a parent really comes in. You may have said no to the previous Deadpool flicks because of their explicit content. Your kids’ friends’ parents might have vetoed the films, too. But now, in order to keep up with the ongoing narrative in the highest-grossing film series of all time (the MCU boasts over $29.8 billion in earnings), you may find yourself considering a film that probably would’ve landed in a video rental store’s back room back in the day.
If you’re able to say no, I think you should. Ryan Reynolds may allow his kids to see the film (the eldest of whom is only 9!), but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take our cues from the guy who plays the “merc with a mouth.”
It will be hard, especially if your teen starts feeling isolated from not seeing it. But that opens the door for you, as a parent, to have some really important conversations about media discernment.
You want to equip your child to make these types of decisions for themselves in the future. So start by having them read Plugged In’s review of Deadpool & Wolverine. Then, try out some of these questions to get the conversation rolling:
- This movie invites audiences to laugh during some of the most gory and/or sexually suggestive moments. How do you think that type of desensitization will affect you in the future?
- When you hear the f-word on repeat, as in this film, do you notice that sort of language ingraining itself in your brain, perhaps even tempting you to use it yourself?
- There’s nothing about Deadpool & Wolverine that glorifies God. That said, your peers aren’t going to see it to glorify God; they’re going because it’s supposed to be a fun film. But if you don’t see it, will you feel isolated from your friends who have?
- How will you determine what films are appropriate to see when you’re an adult? How could you help others to think through the long-term effects of seeing this kind of content throughout their lives?
That discussion may not be the easiest one to have with your kids, but it’s an important one to enter into intentionally if you make the decision that this Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is out of bounds for your family.
