After 8 years, Deadpool & Wolverine can finally break an $800 million Marvel box office trend. Slated for release on July 25, Deadpool & Wolverine will be the MCU’s only cinematic release in 2024, placing a heavy burden on the movie that will immediately follow Marvel’s biggest box office bomb, The Marvels. Thankfully, the fact that so much time could be dedicated to building hype sets Deadpool & Wolverine in good stead, as 2024 is one of the sparsest years for superhero movies since the genre skyrocketed in the 2010s.
Much of the hype surrounding the movie can easily be attributed to the fact that Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool has struck the right chord with fans. Following the universally panned debut of the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Reynolds has spearheaded Deadpool’s cinematic redemption, helping to pen two movies that deliver a far more comic-accurate rendition of Deadpool that has since garnered a fervent fan base. This has turned Deadpool into a bankable franchise – and now it’s in the hands of the MCU, Deadpool & Wolverine‘s box office may be poised to shoot even higher.
Deadpool & Wolverine Can Be The First Deadpool Movie To Make Over $800 Million At The Box Office
According to The Numbers, Deadpool and Deadpool 2 raked in $782 million and $786 million worldwide respectively. Several factors helped the Deadpool franchise succeed so swiftly, not least of which being the R rating that the ultra-violent antihero desperately needed. Ironically, this rating also hampers the potential box office in other ways, as it precludes a large swathe of the typical target audience for superhero movies. Nevertheless, Deadpool & Wolverine has the potential to follow in the footsteps of Joker and break the $800 million mark that Deadpool’s first two movies could not.
The fact that the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer broke the record for being the most-watched movie trailer in history is telling, racking up 365 million views in just 24 hours (via THR). It then continued breaking records by selling more first-day presale tickets (200,000) than any other R-rated movie in history (via THR). Combined with overwhelmingly positive first reactions to the trailer footage, this all suggests that Deadpool & Wolverine is en route to becoming one of, if not the, most successful R-rated movies ever released and should far exceed the ticket sales of Deadpool’s preceding movies.
Though its isolation is mostly due to the writers’ strike of 2023, Deadpool & Wolverine may have inadvertently kicked off Disney’s new approach of prioritizing quality over quantity with future MCU releases.
Deadpool & Wolverine’s Potential Box Office Compared To The MCU’s Biggest Movies
After reflecting on the MCU’s highest-grossing movies, Deadpool & Wolverine has a real shot at breaking $1 billion, let alone $800 million. The MCU’s biggest ensemble movies are typically billion-dollar-earners, with every Avengers movie, Captain America: Civil War, and Spider-Man: No Way Home helping to prove that packing a movie with fan-favorite characters is a lucrative move. Deadpool & Wolverine is poised to star several cameos, with characters from Fox’s X-Men franchise taking center stage. Then there is the marketability of Deadpool’s co-star, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, to compound the enthusiasm.
With that in mind, it stands to reason that Deadpool & Wolverine could reach a similar level to Spider-Man: No Way Home for the nostalgia factor alone. With that being said, its R-rating is going to be a big stumbling block on that route, given Spider-Man: No Way Home was a much less prohibitive PG-13. Though it remains to be seen whether the movie strikes the same chord as the trailers have, there is a big chance that Deadpool & Wolverine could, at least, be the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.
