There’s a certain phrase that gets thrown around in online circles to describe a movie, rarely in a positive way: the “Reddit movie.”
To their detractors, Edgar Wright and the Daniels make Reddit movies; less controversially, David Leitch and Matthew Vaughn’s work has often been described as Reddit. And in theaters right now, alongside the simpatico sensibility of Eli Roth’s Borderlands, we have what may be the ultimate Reddit movie, helmed by the ultimate Reddit director: Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
But what do we talk about when we talk about Reddit movies? Like obscenity, it’s something you know when you see.
It certainly doesn’t refer to just any movie beloved by the user base of the popular social media website. (Christopher Nolan, the patron saint of geeky cinephiles, doesn’t have a single Reddit bone in his body—for crying out loud, the man doesn’t even have an email address.) The surest sign of a Reddit movie is a queasy mixture of flashy, Mountain Dew-misted stylization and smirking, self-aware snark: Imagine Joss Whedon streaming Fortnite on Twitch, and you wouldn’t be far off.
Consider Bullet Train, a film full of look-ma-no-hands fight scenes that can think of nothing funnier than a criminal fixated on Thomas the Tank Engine, or Boy Kills World, a hyper-violent glimpse inside the mind of a mute murder-savant whose thoughts are narrated in the droll tones of H. Jon Benjamin.
Other qualities include a reliance on nostalgic pop culture like ’80s movies or arcade games, to say nothing of omnipresent needle drops (cough, Free Guy, unsubtle cough), as well as a somewhat early-’10s idea of what might be considered “cool.” (Think of Borderlands’ Tina, a teenage girl with bunny ears who gets giddy about carnage, or Kingsman: The Secret Service’s now-unfashionable affection for fancy British people and casual misogyny.) Overall, though, perhaps the most Reddit quality a movie can have is an eagerness to please that verges on desperation: Every bit of action is numbingly eye-catching, every opportunity for fanservice is taken, every quip preempts a joke the audience might make themselves.
Hugh Jackman, Dogpool, and Ryan Reynolds.
Jay Maidment/Marvel StudiosDeadpool & Wolverine, then, represents the apex of the Reddit movie—the final boss, if you will. And it has carried that designation all the way to the bank: It has grossed over $1 billion, and is on the way to become the biggest R-rated film of all time.
The usual mix of ultraviolence and eyebrow-waggling comedy is present from the film’s first fight scene, where the titular Merc with the Mouth dismantles a squadron of TVA time cops with the adamantium bones of Wolverine’s corpse while doing a meme-friendly dance to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye”. But the yuks don’t stop there: Right after the credits, Deadpool gets a meeting with a suspiciously Feige-esque Happy Hogan about joining the Avengers, where he describes “smashturbating” with model Hulk hands before declaring that “rejection makes him hungy (sic).” Ho ho.
As egregious as the humor is, it’s the cavalcade of nostalgia-baiting fanservice that truly makes the film Reddit.
Rob Delaney as Peter in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Jay Maidment/Marvel StudiosOnce Deadpool is pulled into the TVA’s timey-wimey shenanigans, Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen, pitching Tom Wambsgans shtick to the rafters for a paycheck) explains the concept of “anchor beings,” or individuals so important to a given universe that their absence causes them to unravel completely, as well as the “sacred timeline,” which Deadpool can join if he forsakes his current universe after its anchor being, Logan, died in the film of the same name.
It doesn’t stand up to a lick of scrutiny, but it does the job in terms of flattering the audience for caring about Marvel: The TVA watches, rapt, as actual scenes from movies like Endgame and Logan play out on their screens.
Ryan Reynolds and Matthew Macfadyen.
Jay Maidment/Marvel StudiosIt’s all an excuse to get Logan (Hugh Jackman), or at least a version of Logan, back on screen. After a bit where they actually, unironically do a “he’s right behind me, isn’t he?” joke, Deadpool and Wolverine are tossed into a void that resembles the chrome-punk desert of Mad Max, a fact you notice exactly two seconds before Deadpool comments that it looks like Mad Max. The void is essentially a Super-Sargasso Sea (or an Island of Misfit Toys, if you prefer), where the detritus of comic book movies past lives—and if you think they’d pass up the chance to gas up movies like Elektra and the first Fantastic Four, you’re sorely mistaken.
There’s a whole lot more that’s Reddit about the film—the “Like a Prayer” and “Iris” needle drops, the joke about the tortured production of the MCU Blade movie, the dog version of Deadpool (called “Dogpool”, natch) that Wade Wilson fawns over—but perhaps the most telling moment comes right at the beginning, when Deadpool sings along to the Marvel fanfare that opens the film: “just pumps you up, doesn’t it?”
As much as Deadpool’s fourth-wall-breaking shtick allows him to poke at the hand that feeds him, it mostly just lets him be a cheerleader for Marvel’s IP: making the same jokes audience members might (“so Paul Rudd finally aged!”), gasping with delight at each cameo (the Henry Cavill bit is particularly shameless), glancing over his shoulder to make sure everyone is as hyped about, say, Wolverine wearing his mask as they ought to be.
The reason why “Reddit” has become an insult is because of its unique place in internet culture. It’s widely popular (not for nothing was it once called “the front page of the internet”), but mostly populated by a younger, savvier demographic than other sites: Your mom has a Facebook account, but she probably doesn’t have a Reddit account.
Specialized communities of Reddit, or “subreddits,” have largely replaced forums as the place for fans to congregate, and the “karma” system quickly establishes a consensus opinion. From there, echo chambers (or, less politely, “circle jerks”) form, creating a sort of arrested-development morass that rewards the same old content and opinions again and again. From this stew of reheated discourse and “you, sir, win the internet for today”-a** jokes arises modern nerd culture, and from there arises Deadpool & Wolverine and its billion-dollar gross. Alas, there will be more to come.
