I can’t wait for Deadpool 2 to come out. I mean I literally can’t wait, because Deadpool 2’s marketing campaign makes me want to hurl myself into a mincer and I really want it to end.
At this stage, it feels like Deadpool 2 has been coming for several eons. A full year ago, a teaser trailer debuted before screenings of Logan, complete with extended ironic phonebooth changing sequence, ironic 1980s power ballad, the ironic death of Stan Lee and an ironic review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea that calls the whale a “fuckface” of all things.
There was also last year’s “Bob Ross” teaser where Deadpool – in a shirt and wig – made a succession of ironic masturbation jokes for 90 seconds before letting anyone actually see any of the film itself, accompanied by an ironic Deadpool-themed issue of Good Housekeeping (sample headline: “Giving your family the bird”). Most recently, the Deadpool Twitter account ironically live-tweeted the Super Bowl (sample tweet: “God, I love Pink (and not just the pop singer). Besides being my 2nd favorite shade of red, it’s also the color of the inside of people’s outsides and that lady biker gang from Grease #DPtheSB”) so laboriously that it felt like being clobbered across the face with a rubber chicken.
And Deadpool 2 isn’t even out until May. We’ve got months of this still to come. Months of dick jokes and C-grade observational comedy and endless empty instantly dated ironic pop culture references over and over again until everyone on Earth becomes overwhelmingly sick of a film they haven’t even seen yet. It’s becoming less of a marketing campaign and more of an endurance test. This isn’t a sentence I ever thought I’d get to write, but the whole thing is starting to come across like a less witty version of Family Guy.
This week, Deadpool came painfully close to releasing something approaching a straightforward trailer – complete with new characters, an indication of tone and a sizzle reel – only to sabotage itself at the last minute by inserting an insufferable sequence where Deadpool slams a couple of action figures around and chortles. This will never end, will it?
It wasn’t like this last time around. Part of the original Deadpool’s appeal was its status as the little movie that could. Over a decade in the making, it struggled through years of development hell – blasting through various writers and directors and terrible cameos in dismal films and endless studio resistance – until some leaked test footage eventually pushed it over the edge. Forget whatever happened in the actual film itself; by the time it came out, it had built up such a head of goodwill that people were desperate to see it.
There have been no such struggles this time. Deadpool broke so many records upon its release that a sequel was always going to happen. But this time, all the endearing fan-service has transformed into abject bloat.
Compare the film to Disney’s Han Solo prequel, also released in May. Whether by accident or design, the only Solo promotional material anyone saw until recently was a single cast photo. When footage actually emerged during the Super Bowl, people were so ravenous that they chewed it up in droves; at time of writing the teaser has had 6.5m views on YouTube and the trailer itself 8m. For better or worse, people are curious about Solo. Withholding information has actually been a blessing.
Deadpool 2, on the other hand, has taken the opposite route. It has spent so long spewing out an endless jet of self-referential vomit over everything that moves that it is actively dampening my excitement.
It shouldn’t be working this hard. The last film made so much money that people will go and see it regardless. In fact, all this constant spotlight-hogging is starting to look a little desperate. People usually only go to such drastic promotional lengths when they’re not confident in the end result. Might Deadpool, underneath all the smirk and snark and spoof, actually be a little insecure? We’ll find out in … oh God, it’s not even out for another three months, is it? This is agony.
