The only scenario that makes sense to me with the RDJ casting is that he’s also back as some version of Iron Man and they’re not revealing that yet.
Cable and Thanos were both played by the same actor.
Ryan Reynolds played them too?! The guy’s a machine.
A little different. Deadpool 2 was pre-Disney buyout.
However… (MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE)
Chris Evans played Johnny Storm in the pre-buyout Fantastic Four movies and he does so again in the latest Deadpool movie. He’s therefore played Johnny Storm and Captain America under Disney.
I stopped reading comics before these variant universes popped up, other than DC’s JLA and JSA. That was contained to something small and easy to understand.
There were also the one-offs, the “What Ifs” stuff. But that was just fantasy and one-offs, so you could forget them right after reading them.
So now there are comics where it’s canon that Tony Stark is Dr. Doom? I don’t want to know this stuff. It’s like trying to know Tolkien stuff and then having multiple new versions with variants to learn. Just…annoying.
Guess I’m just yelling at clouds, though.
I’m with you. Multiverse stuff just isn’t compelling to me unless you’re actually trying to say something new or worthy about a character that redefines them or at least gives you more understanding about what they do/feel. Most of the time, comic book multiverse stuff is just an excuse for the writers to bash action figures against each other or it’s the lamest surface-level BS like “what if Superman was a Nazi?”
Plus, when you say there are infinite versions of someone in infinitely different universes and they’re all as valid as each other, you’re basically telling me there are no stakes and any story beat can be reset at any time. I stop caring really.
But there are multiple variants to learn… (nothing new though unless you like Amazon’s show)
To be fair, mainstream superhero comics were telling you that long before multiverses came along. It’s pretty inherent to a genre/business model that wants to keep telling stories with the same characters for decades.
Sure in the books. In movies you have the meta-knowledge that actors age and contracts end. Of course the studio can always recast like James Bond and keep a character going forever but even then there are endings. Eventually a hero will come back no matter what because no owner is going to let their IP expire, but we all understand a reboot is inevitable.
A mutiverse tells me that even the current story being told has a safety net. There are infinite worlds of James Bond!
A million times this, for me. I much prefer the James Bond approach where there’s relatively limited continuity and you don’t worry about the fact that he’s been alive and in peak physical condition for a hundred years (and a hundred missions); it’s part of the suspension of disbelief.
The multiverse stuff is what Marvel was forced to do when they ran out of superheroes. People don’t like new super heroes (Except Squirrel Girl), so they would rather read stories about different versions of the same heroes.
This also goes along with how superhero comics get rebooted every couple decades or so.
Extremely popular theory online (seems to be mostly British) that James Bond, much like the 007 designation, isn’t actually a given name, but rather the name given Agent 007. There have, in fact, been many different men bearing the name James Bond, according to this theory.
Of course, this went out of the window with, I believe it was, Skyfall. Much to many fans’ dismay.
(One of my best friends is English and a big James Bond - as long as he isn’t being played by Daniel Craig - fan.)
It can be changed right back, though. Lazenby’s intro clearly stated that he was taking over the mantle from Connery.
I don’t agree with that framing exactly.
I agree that to some unquantifiable-but-obvious extent familiar characters are more valuable than new, untested characters. There’s incentive to keep going back to established, popular characters. As an aside I doubt fans and the companies responsible align exactly on how crucial that is—the publishers probably play it a little safer/lazier than they need to—but the point stands either way.
But “the multiverse stuff is what Marvel was forced to do when they ran out of superheroes” is assigning more blame to one specific story-telling trope than it deserves. There are an endless number of ways to keep bringing characters back, keep updating their stories, keep retelling the old ones, etc., and the MCU has put “the multiverse” into (and quickly out of) fashion lately, but it’s not some uniquely inevitable endpoint of milking your established IP for all it’s worth.
There’s a reason they tell you not to do “and it was all a dream” in your writing. The hunt for $$$ trumps all though.
It was why the time travel was my least favorite part of Endgame (and I wish they had thought of some better solution), and I knew the MCU was in trouble once they started talking of the multiverse as the next “arc” of the MCU. Ruined the original X-Men movies too, IMO.
Multiverse/Time-travel can work for one-off and self-contained stories where the multiverse is part of the point of the story-telling; it works there because it allows for literal self-reflection, as the protagonist of the story meets themselves in different contexts, and the core insanity of the concept matters less. I.e., stuff like "Everything Everywhere, Edge of Tomorrow, the Spiderverse (so far), etc. Or you’re just taking the piss on it (i.e., Deadpool 3).
As a general concept, though, it just doesn’t work because it is basically “it was all a dream” writ large. When you additionally add in that this is almost always only used for mining nostalgia because it sells (or as Michael Shannon said: “These multiverse movies are like somebody playing with action figures. It’s like, ‘Here’s this person. Here’s that person. And they’re fighting!’”"), you’re guaranteed a bunch of trash.
Personally, I’ve given up hope at this point that the MCU will ever become worth watching again. They’re married to stupid concepts from the comics (despite those concepts not working in the comics either), and there’s nothing to indicate they’re taking the right lessons from any of the stuff they’re doing.
Eh… I don’t view the Multiverse stuff the same way as others. Without it, you’d never get the chance to see Deadpool make fun of Gambit’s accent, because you can’t have a film with a cajun who actually talks like one. That’s just one silly example, but it made my day to watch all the stuff with that character in Deadpool vs. Wolverine and make it canon to the universe.
Comics are just stories and sometimes they need a break from the soap opera. I think that’s what we’ve been getting with the multiverse and I’m fine with it. Ultimately we know there’s one sacred timeline. It all springs forth from one consistent whole.
Finally, when someone like Hugh Jackman plays the Wolverine, we can get multiple versions of that character that are different and believable and lovable in their own way. I also think back to Agents of SHIELD, where we had the Framework and saw a completely different version of Fitz, or how Coulson (“Coulson”) changed dramatically played by a fantastic actor in Clark Gregg.
They still have plenty of super heroes to draw from. Their problem is they took the audience for granted and did too much too fast, causing the quality to plummet.
For example, Ant Man 3 was trash. It had nothing to do with running out of Ant Mans.
I think the opposite - the reason why D3 works is that it’s not canon (except in the very loosest sense). No one takes D&W seriously, and nothing in it really matters.
If they every actually try to put Deadpool into the real MCU continuity, it’d break down incredibly fast. It’s like the 4th Wall breaking thing - works great in isolation in a comedic context. Together with other characters? Not so much.
Did you see the movie?