Disaster threatens the most wanted team of Marvel fans
From Chris Snellgrove
| Published
For long-time comic book nerds, half the fun of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is bringing some of our favorite teams from our favorite issues to life on the big screen. With the publication of Deadpool and WolverineOur two titular characters are now part of the MCU and fans can’t stop speculating about who the Merc With the Mouth will team up with on screen next. The most common request has been to pair up a film with Spider-Man and Deadpool, but despite their long history of comical connections, such a combination would be a real feature film disaster.
Spider-Man and Deadpool
Even if you’ve never opened a Marvel comic before, you can probably make a wild guess as to why writers like to put Spider-Man and Deadpool together. Both are very funny characters, known for cracking strange jokes in even the most dangerous battles. Their big personalities collide in amusing and unexpected ways, and the big differences in their morals (Dead Pool Kills and Spider-Man doesn’t) often give them cause for argument when they’re not busy saving the world.
Long story short: Spider-Man and Deadpool have had countless comic team-ups that provide serious entertainment value. So why do I argue that they shouldn’t have their own? MCU work together? First of all, the characters’ large age difference would make their on-screen collaboration strange; Ryan Reynolds is a full two decades older than Tom Holland (48 vs. 28), which would inevitably make this seem less like a team of equals and more like a really weird Batman and Robin style hero/sidekick story.
Plus, one of the strange luxuries of comics is that most characters are frozen at a certain age over time. Peter Parker was a teenage crime fighter who now exists as a man in his late 20s. Despite his decades-long publishing history, Spider-Man still has a lifetime of experience that helps him work with and occasionally even form a bond with Deadpool. While Holland is in his late 20s in real life, Spider-Man in the MCU is still so youth-coded that it wouldn’t make sense for him to be dating a middle-aged mercenary mass murderer.
The moral problem
This leads us to the annoying moral problem. It’s a great running gag in Deadpool’s solo films that he has no inhibitions about killing, and our title character leaves a small graveyard behind after every big action scene. Because of this, he works onscreen with other characters who don’t exactly have a problem with killing, including Cable and wolverine. After the misadventures with these merciless mutants, it would be completely hopeless bizarre that Deadpool, along with Peter Parker, the moral core of the MCU, puts in maximum murder effort.
At this point some might say Wonder could change either Spider-Man or Deadpool; Maybe make the latter less violent, or make the former somehow cool (possibly via a variant) with chaos and carnage. However, this would arguably cheapen these characters and ultimately fail to give audiences what they want: an authentic version of the characters they know and love working together on screen. Anything else would betray the audience, and anything else would betray the characters.
The solution is simple: as much as fans want it, a Spider-Man/Deadpool MCU team-up should be off the table. At least with this version of these characters. Considering Marvel will probably reboot the entire universe after this Secret warsWe may see a very different Spider-Man and a very different Deadpool team up at some point. However, whether anyone would still want to see it after years of painful superhero fatigue is another question entirely.
