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paldobet What Will It Take for Hollywood to Grow Up?
By the end of this weekendpaldobet, “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the latest film from Disney’s recently beleaguered Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, will likely have surpassed $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. This success would seem to be a win for audiences that want both big franchise movies and adult content. Unlike most of Disney’s superhero movies, which are carefully engineered to appeal to the widest possible commercial audience (adults, children and international censors), the R-rated “Deadpool & Wolverine” is stuffed full of foul language, sex jokes and gore.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” is certainly not for kids. But I’d struggle to say that it’s for grown-ups either.
Disney’s newest superhero film features plenty of violence, bloody and relentless and eventually mind-numbing. The titular characters have healing powers that render them effectively invulnerable, and the combat is just an excuse for more jokes, so most of the violence achieves nothing emotionally. Similarly, filthy wisecracks abound, but there’s no actual sex in the movie — nothing that could create real emotional stakes. Meanwhile, the character of Deadpool, as played by Ryan Reynolds, is defined by his trademark meta patter, through which he constantly reassures the audience that what they’re watching shouldn’t be taken seriously. At its core, this new made-for-adults film is still just another big-budget franchise movie based on empty nostalgia and catering to childishness, if not children.
I know I’m not alone in finding the film’s fundamental nature distressing (one headline branded the movie “the year’s most depressing success story”) or in lamenting Hollywood’s broader abandonment of popular entertainment made for adults. For decades now, Americans have been living in a period of all-conquering artistic populism; our culture industry has fully absorbed the notion that there is no sin greater than snobbery when it comes to appreciation of music or movies or television. We’ve essentially gotten rid of the divide between children’s and adult entertainment, insisting that it’s perfectly fine — maybe even preferable — to have the same tastes as an adult that you had as a child. (Or, perhaps, the same tastes that your child currently has, given the size of the adult “Bluey” audience.)
If there’s been one dominant message in 21st-century American artistic culture, it’s that you have permission — permission to consume nothing but superhero movies, Barbie, pop music by a recent Disney Channel star; permission to never eat your cultural vegetables; permission to never expand your cultural palate or stretch your attention span.
This permission may seem freeing. But when paired with ruthless, profit-maximizing market forces, it’s contributed to the death of grown-up entertainment.
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