10 Times Hollywood Learned The Wrong Lesson From Movies

Back in 2006, the prospect of a Deadpool movie grossing almost $800 million worldwide seemed positively ludicrous.

Even accepting the niche status of its title character and the audience-limiting R-rating, Deadpool's meta, fourth wall-breaking tendencies seemed to place an even lower ceiling on the number of people who could connect with it.

Yet Deadpool was a critical and commercial hit, proving that the mainstream wasn't as averse to aggressively self-aware humour as most analysts expected. And so, movies and TV as a whole felt empowered to start peeking behind the curtain more egregiously than ever before, ushering in an era of shamelessly postmodern cinema.

Though this theoretically allowed creatives to be more playful and subversive, it also arguably resulted in Hollywood getting a little too comfortably wink-wink for its own good, to the point that it became a crutch - a substitute for actual storytelling.

Take an extreme case like The Matrix Resurrections, which was more-or-less two hours of Lana Wachowski flipping the bird at Warner Bros. rather than, you know, a legit story compellingly told.

Without Deadpool's success we likely wouldn't have movies like Ralph Breaks the Internet, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Free Guy, Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, and an argument could be made that it helped prime audiences for the metaversal trend that's all the rage - all of this for better and worse.

Meta storytelling can certainly be fun and entertaining, but it can also train audiences to see self-awareness as content in of itself, while rejecting anything earnest as "lame".