WK7

 

Superheroes have been a staple of popular stories since the dawn of time. Whether we talk about heroes such as Beowulf, one of the oldest epic heroes, who has super strength and fights the typical good vs. evil fight or superheroes like Captain America or Superman that we are familiar with today there was always a need to subvert expectations of both the author and the audience. From superheroes that are considered objective good above all else, we brought questions of the validity of their justice. Superman with Zack Snyder became something resembling a tyrant, villains like the Joker became more and more sympathetic with every iteration and a growing interest for antiheroes fostered in the age of characters like Harley Quinn and Deadpool, taking morally grey characters through a journey typically reserved for a righteous hero.

Deadpool was a massive risk that Fox barely gave the green light to. There were attempts to bring the mirk with a mouth onto the big screen for years, many helmed by the actor Ryan Reynolds that portrays him now since 2016, but they all failed out of a fear of it bombing. From the perspective of old executives and producers it was a deviation from the model, one they didn’t want to cash out. But something that proves just how wrong they were to assume it would fail is the numbers. Deadpool dominates as one of the highest-earning R-rated movies of all time and with good reason. Where there is mass culture there is a need to question it, reinspect it and turn it on it’s head. In the age of the internet subcultures faded into popular culture, alternate became mainstream and the same way comic books were something only a nerd would read, they became a staple at the box office. Deadpool, is only one of many ways emerging ideas of the youth bleed into big studios, and as more control is given to fresh minds we will the questioning of the status quo not as an outliner but a given, maybe even turning genuine questions of our culture into a commodity to feed the very culture we’re questioning.