I always have learned a lot from young people.  Yes, adults have lived long lives and have much to teach based on experience.  But kids are freshly created and don’t have assumptions yet baked into their thought process.  So I listened when one of my grandsons wanted to see the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie doing big business at the theater.  It’s one of the rare movies these days to hit over one billion dollars, so that’s a significant financial triumph that is at least good for theater owners.  I want theater owners to survive all this World Economic Forum wokeness, so I was interested in why so many people liked Deadpool.  I’m not a Deadpool fan. I don’t want to see Marvel characters cursing and talking about sex and drugs, and the Deadpool movies are R-rated experiences filled with a lot of bad stuff.  So, up to now, I have had zero interest in anything Deadpool.  However, my policy with my children and grandchildren is to take the edge away of any forbidden fruits in society with guidance.  So when he asked me to take him to the movie theater to see the movie, I didn’t hesitate.  We made it a somewhat family affair, with my daughters going along to watch the film with us and make any commentary about it that needed to be made from an adult leadership perspective.  All the world needs is another kid out there speaking in a trashy way with F-bombs and drug references.  And this was a Disney production now, so here was Disney, who used to get criticized for making too many G-rated movies, putting out an R-rated horror of sin and indulgence.  However, after watching the movie, I noticed much worth seeing, which became apparent quickly.  And I could understand why my grandson liked Deadpool so much.   I have always liked Wolverine from the X-Men, so I thought I could at least like that much of it.  But in the end, I liked Deadpool & Wolverine for many unexpected reasons.

So here’s the lowdown I have talked about extensively throughout the previous decade: Disney is dead.  They have mismanaged the company and are only surviving now because they are too big to fail.  But they have lost their core audience.  They enjoy decades of brand building, and roughly 50% of all adults are willing to go into serious debt to take their kids to Disney World for a vacation.  That trend will not pass to the next generation, so once these current kids grow up and become adults themselves, they will not follow that path.  I am happy I could take my kids, their kids, and their husbands to Disney World last year, which was extraordinarily expensive.  At least my family had a chance to see Disney before it declined into oblivion, and the Deadpool character is very much a cultural symbol of that. Part of what makes Deadpool movies so funny is that Disney is aware of its decline, and that’s part of the strange joke in the film.  Deadpool used to be a 20^th Century Fox thing, but after Bob Iger, as the CEO, bought up that media property, they acquired several Marvel characters, such as Spiderman, the X men, and, of course, Deadpool, among other things.  But it was like bringing in Kamala Harris for president over Joe Biden for Disney.  It was a sugar high at best and only delayed the inevitable decline of a media company that had gone global woke and lost its domestic audience toward family value.  It’s hard to become a leader of the global citizen movement as an anti-family provocateur of sexual grooming of children and still be the bastion of family values that it’s known for.  That is why theme parks still get so much respect from parents who want to give their children a good life and think a vacation there will do the trick.  But it can’t; once you lose that reputation, it’s gone forever. 

Yet that is the theme of the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie.  Both characters are about regeneration; when wounded, they heal almost like reptiles.  So, the movie and the characters are more about second chances than anything else.  And in a social context, that is the same thing the nation and world are going through.  Most people can relate to Deadpool and all his mistakes because, at his heart, he is a person who wants to do good and be respected.  Ultimately, Deadpool wants to become a respected Avenger and to be one of the good guys, which I found surprising given the R-rated nature of the content.  However, the movie is very self-aware of its situation in society; it is essentially an anti-woke movie in the style of an old 80s film that checks all the boxes of the World Economic Forum investors who require excessive wokeness to be produced.  There are a lot of gay references in the film and discussions about drugs, but not in a way that promotes them as much as Deadpool has to overcome them to be who he wants to be.  But yet, the plot is filled with overt references, which, of course, the wokesters out there love.  I don’t support any of that, but as a running commentary on our current social status and the position of Disney as a media company that is undoubtedly headed on hard times ahead, it is an interesting observation of itself. 

The Marvel films had a plan that started with a series of movies in the last decade that were very traditional heroic enterprises.  I loved the Captain America movies, and the Civil War between Captain America and Iron Man, with all the tag-alongs, was terrific cinema.  But then we entered the overt woke era of the most recent movies, and there are a lot of horrible decisions made, starting with Captain Marvel and moving into The Eternals, which I thought was a horrendously lousy movie with overt gay characters in it that just made the whole thing no fun to watch.  Disney continues to make horrible decisions, such as what they are doing with their Land of the Villains announcement for Disney World, their closing of Tom Sawyer’s Island, which is my favorite part, and embracing villains in their family offerings because these days, so many people see themselves as Deadpool sees himself.  They can’t relate with the good guys anymore.  But at least with Deadpool, he wants to be a good guy, even though he’s been essentially a bad guy.  Marvel is trying to do as the characters in Deadpool & Wolverine: regenerate themselves and heal.  Their new Marvel movies are trying to get back to the basics.  As America tries to make itself Great Again as a country, media companies are also trying to do the same.  Everyone is looking in the mirror and asking if this is where we want to be.  That is what the new Deadpool movie is all about, asking those essential questions.  So it was pretty good.  Too late to save Disney.  But it’s a good thing to talk about as a patient lays dying on an operating table as a last thought and sentiment.  There is a humanity in Deadpool that people are clinging to, which surprised me.  And I certainly understand why young people would be attracted to that message.  They want to have hope that their future can be better than the past.  Because for them, they don’t have any memory of the good ol’ days.  Just the days of woke losers and political hacks who have ruined the world with bad decisions and tried to sell the mess as redemption.

Rich Hoffman

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