When the returns started coming in for Deadpool on its opening weekend of Feb. 12, 2016, producer Simon Kinberg thought there had been a mistake. “When the movie came on tracking, we thought it was a clerical error, then we realized that it wasn’t an error, but it was opening like a real superhero movie,” Kinberg told Deadline in 2017. “Heading into the weekend, we hoped that it would open to $70M-$80M, but then it opened to $132M-plus.”
Altogether, Deadpool pulled in $782 million, made even more spectacular by the fact that 20th Century Fox had only spent $58 million on the film. The stunning haul defied the conventional wisdom Hollywood had followed for years: that an R-rated superhero movie would have limited appeal. Instead, Deadpool was a massive success and it signaled near-immediate change in the business of superhero movies. Fox announced a sequel just a couple of months later, and Logan, already in production, was quickly confirmed to be R-rated. The ramifications of Deadpool’s surprise success can still be felt today: Deadpool & Wolverine (also R-Rated) was the second biggest movie of 2024 with a $1.3 billion box office return.
The credit for Deadpool’s success, of course, belongs with its star Ryan Reynolds, director Tim Miller, plus writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. That said, Deadpool also benefitted from being released at just the right time. Had it come out a few years earlier or a few years later, it might have been a very different movie without the same impact.
By the time Deadpool came out in 2016, there had been a full decade and a half of modern superhero movies, an era which began in 2000 with the first X-Men film. While, yes, the Blade trilogy, which was also R-rated, kicked off two years earlier in 1998, even the top-grossing film of that franchise (Blade II) only pulled in $155 million at the box office, which is considerably smaller than the near $300 million X-Men made. If anything, Blade’s financial ceiling may have helped inform the conventional wisdom that, to be a major success, a comic book film had to be PG-13.
Anyway, 2000’s X-Men kicked off a new era of superhero blockbusters that was only reinforced by the success of Spider-Man in 2002, X2: X-Men United in 2003 and Spider-Man 2 in 2004. The genre reached even bigger heights in 2008 when DC released The Dark Knight, which redefined the artform by being more of a crime thriller than a typical superhero film (proof that the superhero mold can be successfully broken). That same year, Marvel launched its cinematic universe with Iron Man, and over the next few years the MCU illustrated that you could tell a coherent, connected story across several different films with different heroes, which culminated in the $1.5 billion success of 2012’s Avengers.
Yet all was not perfect in the genre during this period. While the MCU made few major errors before Deadpool’s release, other studios weren’t so successful. DC struggled with 2011’s Green Lantern, and Sony’s Spider-Man 3, while profitable, drew scorn from fans and critics alike for being overstuffed with too much plot and too many villains.
The bloom was especially off the rose over at Fox. After the success of X2: X-Men United, the third film failed to capture the same levels of excitement and maturity. Fox’s various Daredevil and Fantastic Four movies failed to be major hits. And, most directly related to Deadpool, 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine downright infuriated fans for how it mishandled so many characters from the X-Men franchise. The movie was so bad Fox basically decided to scrap its X-Men universe and relaunch it with 2011’s First Class.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine did no character dirtier than Deadpool. The quippy “Merc with a Mouth” — as the comic books called him — was literally rendered mouthless. He was also given all kinds of weird powers and made to look nothing like his comic book counterpart. The only thing the movie did right by Deadpool was cast Reynolds, who not only was perfect for the part in his ability to handle the action and comedy of the character, but became Deadpool’s biggest advocate for the character’s own starring vehicle.
To Fox’s credit, the company was open-minded enough to a Deadpool movie to film test footage for it in 2012, but ultimately shelved the project. Two years later, in July 2014, Reynolds famously leaked the footage — something he finally admitted to in 2025 — which was met with a tremendously positive response from fans. A few months later, in September 2014, Fox officially announced a Deadpool movie.
When Deadpool came out in 2016, it was informed by a decade and a half of comic book movies, both successes and failures alike. With the failures, it’s pretty clear how that went into Deadpool. Everyone involved in making the film was happy to poke fun at other comic book movies, especially ones that featured Reynolds. Thanks to the character’s fourth-wall breaking powers, Deadpool himself was able to crack jokes about the actor’s performances in both X-Men Origins: Wolverine and 2011’s Green Lantern.
Reynolds and co. were also happy to hit Fox where it really hurt by pointing out just how convoluted its X-Men movies had become. In one memorable moment, Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) shows up and threatens to bring Deadpool to Professor X. Deadpool replies: “McAvoy or Stewart? These timelines are so confusing!”
But while Deadpool’s lampooning of comic book movies gave the film a unique voice, the storytelling of Deadpool was far more conventional. On a budget of just $58 million, the filmmakers were forced to play it safe, with a relatively simplistic villain in Ajax (Ed Skrein), who was chosen specifically because he helped tell Deadpool’s origin story. It was a formula Marvel had found success with in Iron Man, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. The MCU had a clear, almost cookie-cutter formula for establishing a hero, and while Deadpool was a Fox film, it very much stuck to Marvel’s playbook.
Had the movie come out a few years earlier, like, say, a year after the test footage was filmed in 2012, it’s possible Marvel’s formula could have played less of a part, since the studio was still proving itself in the lead-up to Avengers. By 2016, not only had the MCU paved the way forward, but a number of bad comic book movies released to capitalize on Marvel’s success meant audiences were ready for Deadpool to take a dump on the genre.
On the other end, it’s pretty clear why Deadpool might not have happened much later than 2016: Disney.
Disney bought Fox in 2019 and proceeded to take its sweet time reintroducing the characters Fox controlled into the greater MCU. We finally got a Fantastic Four movie in 2025, and the MCU’s first proper X-Men film likely isn’t coming until 2028. Had Deadpool not already had two successful movies under his belt when Disney bought Fox, it’s hard to imagine the House of Mouse would have agreed to subvert the X-Men with Deadpool before even establishing them. At the earliest, Disney likely would have waited until the 2030s to get to an obscure X-Men character like Deadpool, and by that time it’s unlikely the company would have cast a 50-something Ryan Reynolds.
Aside from the simple question of timing, it’s also really hard to imagine Disney being the first studio to greenlight a major R-rated superhero movie (complete with a notorious pegging joke). Yes, Disney was willing to follow this already-established R-rated formula for a third Deadpool movie, but I sincerely doubt they’d break the mold to begin with — something Fox only did because it had failed so much in the years leading up to Deadpool that it was finally willing to take a (measured) risk. Even now, after the MCU has had numerous failures post-Avengers: Endgame, Disney still seems reluctant to break its once reliable formula.
No, to get the Deadpool movie we got — and the ones we’re continuing to get — it had to be Fox and it had to be Ryan Reynolds and it had to be 2016. Otherwise, there’d be no Deadpool horny for Colossus, no Deadpool’s pantless baby legs, and certainly no Morena Baccarin pegging Deadpool.
