Marvel Fans’ Most-Wanted Teamup Is A Disaster In The Making
For longtime comics nerds, half the fun of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is seeing some of our favorite team-ups from our favorite issues brought to life on the big screen. With the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, both our title characters are now part of the MCU, and fans can’t stop speculating about who the Merc With the Mouth will team up with next onscreen. The most popular request has been to get a film teaming up Spider-Man and Deadpool, but despite their long history of comic team-ups, such a combination would be an unmitigated cinematic disaster.
Spider-Man And Deadpool
Even if you’ve never cracked open a Marvel comic, you can probably take a wild guess about why writers love to team up Spider-Man and Deadpool. Both of these are very funny characters who are famous for cracking weird jokes in the middle of even the most dangerous battles. Their big personalities bounce off each other in amusing and unexpected ways, and the huge differences in their morality (Deadpool kills and Spider-Man doesn’t) often give them things to argue about when they aren’t busy saving the world.
Long (box) story short, Spider-Man and Deadpool have had countless comic team-ups that deliver some serious entertainment value, so why am I arguing that they shouldn’t get their own MCU team-up? For starters, the major difference in the characters’ ages would make the onscreen collaboration weird, Ryan Reynolds is a full two decades older than Tom Holland (48 vs. 28, respectively), which would inevitably make this look less like a team-up of equals and more like a really weird hero/sidekick tale in the vein of Batman and Robin.
Plus, one of the strange luxuries of comics is that while time passes, most characters are frozen in a certain age. Peter Parker was a teen crimefighter who now perpetually exists as a man in his late 20s. Across decades of publishing history, Spider-Man still has a lifetime of experience that helps him work with Deadpool and, on occasion, even bond with him. While Holland is in his late 20s in real life, the MCU still has Spider-Man so youth-coded that it would make no sense for him to be hanging around a middle-aged mercenary mass killer.
The Morality Problem
That leads us to the pesky morality problem. In Deadpool’s solo movies, it’s a great running gag that he has no compunctions about killing, and our title character leaves a small graveyard in the wake of every big action scene. That’s why his onscreen team-ups are with other characters that don’t exactly have a problem with killing, including Cable and Wolverine. After misadventures with those merciless mutants, it would be downright bizarre to have Deadpool providing maximum murder effort alongside Peter Parker, the MCU’s moral core.
At this point, some might say Marvel could change up either Spider-Man or Deadpool; make the latter less violent, perhaps, or somehow make the former cool (possibly via a Variant) with chaos and carnage. However, doing so would arguably cheapen these characters while ultimately failing to give audiences what they want: an authentic version of the characters they know and love teaming up onscreen. Anything less would betray the audience, and anything more would betray the characters.
The solution is simple: for as much as fans claim to want it, a Spider-Man/Deadpool MCU team-up should be off the table. At least, with this version of these characters. Considering that Marvel is likely to reboot the whole universe after Secret Wars, we may eventually see a very different Spider-Man and a very different Deadpool teaming up. Whether or not anyone will still want to see it after years of painful superhero fatigue, though, is another question altogether.
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