Robert Downey Jr. will return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the supervillain Dr. Doom. I just wrote a new piece for Vulture speculating about the Iron Man star’s surprising new role. I hope you enjoy the write-up.
Downey’s appearance at Comic-Con capped a transformative weekend for Marvel. The brand had a couple years of bad press. Now the franchise’s first star is returning as its central villain, while Deadpool & Wolverine just made all the money.
I saw Deadpool & Wolverine on opening night with the right crowd. Every time a new cameo walked onscreen, there was a loud cheer of shock-laughter. I felt that precise excitement when one character in particular walked onscreen. And then that character did what everyone always does in a Deadpool movie: Swear, act like a jerk, say a non-joke that’s funny if you follow movie news, do one of those Kingsman fight scenes where one long “shaky-cam” single take is obviously lots of CGI stapling together boring choreography.
Back in 2018, I thought Deadpool 2 was a lot of fun. Can’t tell if that’s a boring or unconventional opinion. The movie confirmed the popularity of Ryan Reynolds’ meta-snarky hero, blowing past Ant-Man and Fantastic Beasts sequels when those franchises still seemed like healthy financial (if empty artistic) investments. The second Deadpool gloried in its runty corner of the already-quite-slapdash X-Men movieverse. Josh Brolin and Zazie Beetz played Cable and Domino, two hardcore remnants of a gun-crazy comics history. Both performers managed to be genuinely funny and way cool. Julian Dennison gave a fun demon-kid performance.
Fun stuff all around, even if the movie’s murdered-girlfriend inciting incident was pretty blah. Boring idea, and rude to Morena Baccarin, who was having much more superhero-adjacent fun as a doctor-turned-underworld boss-turned-ten more things over on Gotham.
Baccarin is back in Deadpool & Wolverine because no death matters in superhero movies. In a strange way, the sequel treats her worse. Vanessa appears in an opening scene with the whole ensemble from the first two movies. Beetz, Brolin, and Dennison are nowhere. Most of Deadpool’s old friends exit the movie immediately, left behind by the universe-hopping plot until the very end. They have to make way for cameos.
It all leaves a weird taste in your mouth. Reynolds-as-Deadpool comes off like your old buddy who ditched your friend group to hang out with his new, more popular, much richer crowd. This is not what the movie wants you to think. There’s an explicit misfit-toys subplot that all the forgotten superhero-movie characters were left behind by history. I don’t buy it. All famous actors playing these superheroes — like [spoiler], [spoiler], [spoiler], and [spoiler] — are doing just fine. The real forgotten personalities in Deadpool & Wolverine are, bizarrely, all the old Deadpool characters. When the cute dog gets more screen time than Morena Baccarin, something’s gone wrong.