Well, after all our rampant speculation about how Disney would bring Wolverine into the MCU, and whether or not Taron Egerton would play him, Ryan Reynolds posted a video on Twitter revealing Hugh Jackman would be playing Logan once again in Deadpool 3. And that’s great news for a lot of reasons, but one in particular: it’s one last chance to make Wolverine actually dress like Wolverine.
Disney, Marvel… it’s time to bust out the yellow spandex.
“What Would You Prefer, Yellow Spandex?”
Fox’s take on X-Men did a lot of stuff right, but it’s also a product of its time – and at the time, making a movie based on a Marvel comic was an extremely risky endeavor. The success of Blade paved the way for the X-Men to hit the big screen, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the wardrobe of Bryan Singer’s movie mutants might have been attempting to ride the leather coattails of the daywalker himself. Then again, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, tight black and/or leather outfits were all the rage: The Matrix, Mission: Impossible 2, Charlie’s Angels, Entrapment, Tomorrow Never Dies and The Avengers – the Uma Thurman one, not the Marvel one – all had a similar fashion sense.
The original X-Men even has that joke where Wolverine gripes about going out in public in leather jumpsuits, to which Cyclops quips: “What would you prefer, yellow spandex?” And I mean. Yeah. Spandex or Lycra, Neoprene, Pleather. The material is irrelevant, but a little color would be nice.
69 Deadpool 2 Easter Eggs and References
X-Men producer Ralph Winter has said in interviews since then that the intent of that line was a wink and a nod to fans of the comic, rather than to poke fun at the source material. Winter admitted certain concessions had to be made in order to make X-Men appeal to a wider audience – like Wolverine not having the stature of Joe Pesci or the body hair of Robin Williams – and also pointed out that the leather outfits were chosen out of convenience, since they meant the stars would spend less time in wardrobe. Okay, they might have been less of a hassle than the rubbery superhero costumes in, say, Spawn or Batman and Robin, but the color of an outfit has no bearing whatsoever on how easy it is to put on. And ultimately, the leather suits were so tight at first the actors had trouble climbing over a three-foot wall.
Following the movie’s success, the comics actually followed suit in multiple timelines – Ultimate X-Men gave the Ol’ Canucklehead a makeover that inverted his classic color scheme to be mostly black with a few yellow stripes, and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men gave the whole team an overhaul that was more evocative of sexy firemen than conventional superheroes.
A few years after X-Men’s big-screen debut, its box office success was blown out of the water by Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, which featured an impressively faithful interpretation of the wallcrawler’s extremely colorful suit. It would’ve been nice if subsequent X-Men movies followed this example, but presumably Fox didn’t want to mess with what had already worked once.
X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand gave Wolverine’s suit some festive yellow piping, but that was as close as Fox got to putting him in anything close to his classic comic looks… Well, at least until the infamous deleted scene from The Wolverine, where Logan gets his iconic brown costume from the 1980s… which he then… never actually wore on screen? What the f***?
Also, a brief aside: The Wolverine introduced Yukio, who was inexplicably styled to look like some kind of Harajuku spin on Pippi Longstocking by way of Where’s Waldo’s girlfriend Wenda, despite the fact that in the comics… SHE ACTUALLY WEARS A BLACK LEATHER JUMPSUIT.
X-Men: Days of Future Past DID give Wolverine a new costume, but rather than doing something with the comic-accurate one that had been put together for The Wolverine, they replaced black motorcycle leather with a tactical carbon fiber scuba suit that bafflingly featured blue and orange accents – and really, why even bother? That says Goku as much as it does Wolverine.
Despite the hit-or-miss nature of Fox’s X-Men movies, Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of Wolverine is a consistent high point – it’s just a pity that in his nine-movie, 17-year tenure as Weapon X, he never completely looked the part… But, there’s still hope.
Marvel Cinematic Unitards
Since he first played Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine – possibly the most egregious reimagining of a Marvel character to date – Ryan Reynolds has made good with the fans twice over. Despite Deadpool constantly skewering (sometimes literally) Fox’s other X-properties, the Deadpool movies – specifically the second one – have been two of the most faithful adaptations of the mutant-centric corner of the Marvel Universe. I mean, look at the Colossus and Juggernaut fight. Sure, Juggernaut could use more red and Colossus could use more Yellow, but I’ll take it.
Over in the MCU, the costumes have been pretty consistently in-line with their comic book counterparts since day one. It’s not like they need an excuse to redesign characters, but the current disarray of the Multiverse is allowing for quite a few makeovers: Loki and WandaVision gave us some classic outfits in the form of Halloween costumes and an alternate timeline variant. Spider-Man: No Way Home made good on some of Sony’s more questionable wardrobe choices for past villains, redesigning The Green Goblin and Electro in ways that pulled from the comics. No Way Home's concept artists even toyed with putting The Lizard in his classic labcoat and purple pants.
Meanwhile, Multiverse of Madness showed us the most comic accurate versions of Black Bolt and Professor X to date – as well as Reed Richards, though, in Fox’s defense, the matching jumpsuits were one of the few things the Fantastic Four movies did right. Obviously, those versions were all killed off, but still. They looked good!
How Wolverine fits into Deadpool 3, and the MCU as a whole, isn’t something I’m worried about. If there’s one thing that can hand-wave far-fetched plot points even more shamelessly than the idea of the multiverse, it’s Wade Wilson’s ability to break the fourth wall and crack jokes to the audience. This movie will almost definitely be a ton of fun, and I’m just ridiculously excited to see these two fan-favorite characters interacting on the big screen – in an R-rated movie, no less. But if this is actually Hugh Jackman’s final victory lap outing as Wolverine, I think Marvel Studios owes it to us to put him in yellow and blue or at the very least, brown and orange.
With Wolverine confirmed, what else do you hope to see in Deadpool 3, wardrobe-related or otherwise? The return of Cable? Fastball special? A do-over for Taskmaster? A T-Ray? Sound off in the comments – and for everything Marvel, keep it right here on IGN.