POP WOW: Deadpool vs. Wolverine is Somehow the Most Spiritual Movie of the Summer

Ryan Reynolds, Old-School Fandom, and Recovering a Sense of Pop Culture Joy

I saw the first Deadpool at the Landmark Theater on Sunset Boulevard, about as Hollywood a place as you can find. If Grauman’s Chinese Theater is where the stars go to walk the red carpet and stick their hands in cement, the Landmark on Sunset is where they slip away from their homes in the Hollywood Hills to actually see a movie. And every aspect of its décor signals an understated (but also clearly stated) wealth and status.

I was a staff writer on a TV show at the time, and it was going pretty poorly. Both me and the pal I went with, an incredibly likable guy with a brain for nerddom and a sense of humor that I absolutely adored, found ourselves often considered by a number of the other writers in the room with the kind of cool distance that said everything about our futures. We were trying our best, but we were flopping hard.

I remember sitting back in Landmark’s ultra-comfy faux leather chairs, basically hoping to escape my existence for a few hours. And then, as Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” played over a freeze frame of a surprised looking guy involved in some kind of very nasty moment, the opening credits rolled.  

One after another ridiculed the cast and creative team— the film’s director Tim Miller was listed only as “Some douchebag” and later “Overpaid tool”;  Ryan Reynolds was listed as “God’s perfect idiot” while the People magazine cover proclaiming him “Sexiest Man Alive!” flew by, followed soon after by a wallet with a trading card of Reynolds as Green Lantern.

And after a laundry list of tropes for cast members—“hot chick”; “British villain”; “moody teen”—all while the freeze frame scene kept pulling farther and farther out to reveal a moment of utter insanity—the writers’ own credit came up: “THE REAL HEROES HERE.”

My friend and I howled. But in retrospect it felt like more than a passing joke, a little nod from the universe that maybe there really was value in being a writer, even a flailing, loserly kind of one.