'Deadpool & Wolverine' Won Gen Z Through Piracy. But the Good Kind?
Illegal clips flooded TikTok and social media, shared even by Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy. The future of movie marketing or a slippery slope?
This Ankler Feature is a 10-minute read
Deadpool & Wolverine starts with one of the more electrifying opening sequences in superhero movie history. (Be forewarned that this story contains some spoilers circulating online.) To the tune of “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) uses the bones of Wolverine from Logan to fight a crew of workers from the Time-Variance Authority.
The scene — and the song — resonated, with fans organically stoking online engagement by mimicking the dance performed by Deadpool with a clip of the song as the soundtrack, elevating “Bye Bye Bye” into Spotify’s global top 20.
You can find a lot more than these homages. Full, high-definition or theater-shot recordings of Deadpool & Wolverine can be found on the internet, something which certainly happens with other films in malicious ways. But for this movie, much of it has come in the form of one or two-minute clips posted by fans, not only the opening scene, but you can effectively piece together all of Deadpool & Wolverine through the scenes that have been widely posted.
The scene where Blade (Wesley Snipes) makes his long-awaited return: hard to miss.
Deadpool goes searching for Wolverine variants? It’s out there.
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Deadpool and Wolverine prepare to face all the Deadpool variants? That’s around, too.
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And in a final, Shyamalan-worthy twist, the opening scene was reposted by both Reynolds and director Shawn Levy on their X accounts (albeit embedded within a popular meme):
Deadpool & Wolverine will cruise to become the franchise’s first billion-dollar grosser this weekend, helped in part by what Levy described to Richard Rushfield as “the most 360-degree campaign that I’ve ever seen. Maybe Barbie pulled off something akin to what I’ve seen the team do on Deadpool.”
The underlying story of the meme-ification and theater recording is who’s doing it. In Deadpool & Wolverine’s opening weekend, 60 percent of the audience was between the ages of 18-34. As Loren Schwartz, a former head of marketing at Sony, puts it: “You’re not going to do this with a faith-based movie that tracks older females, right?”
Last summer, Barbie had its real-life Malibu DreamHouse.
Is this summer’s movie marketing innovation . . . selective piracy? I’ll talk to experts below who explain:
The Gen Z marketing trend that these viral clips tap into
How the small screen can be deployed to drive people to the big screen
What this phenomenon signals for the future of social media marketing
How Disney likely rationalized and decided to participate in the proliferation of Deadpool clips
Why Disney may be playing with fire by allowing these pirated clips to circulate widely
The lesson from Paramount’s Mean Girls TikTok stunt