No one would have been surprised, nor would they have cared, if Deadpool & Wolverine turned Hugh Jackman’s comics accurate yellow suit into an easy joke. The gag seemingly wrote itself, especially in a fourth-wall breaking movie. The original X-Men film, which got its own meta laugh out of him not putting in yellow spandex, provided Wade Wilson with the perfect setup.
“Why are you wearing your costume?”
“What would you prefer, black leather?”
Instead the movie took 20-plus years of anticipation and gave us something so much better than a quippy one-liner. It made the payoff of finally seeing Logan’s comic book costume on the big screen worth the long wait by making his reason for wearing it one of the best parts of Deadpool & Wolverine.
We didn’t need any sort of explanation for why Hugh Jackman wore his character’s comics costume in Deadpool & Wolverine. In the infinite multiverse an infinite number of Wolverines have an infinite number of reasons for wearing a yellow and blue superhero suit. The film also worked in large part because it actively didn’t care about making sense of most things. It was just having fun. And actually seeing Jackman in yellow was a whole lot of fun. The movie successfully turned another longtime comics fan complaint into comedy gold, too. The comic accurate-tall Logan was a fantastic, short visual gag.
But Deadpool & Wolverine opted to do something much more powerful. It gave Logan’s costume real meaning to both the character and the story.
Throughout the film, Wade kept asking Logan why a disgraced superhero would not only wear his suit, but keep it on underneath his normal clothes. Wolverine repeatedly refused to answer, building more and more suspense the film would have to justify. The answer more than did that.
A sad, broken Logan finally explained his attire to Laura, the person in the multiverse who understands him best, while he considered whether or not to fight for Wade’s universe. “Scott used to beg me to wear this suit,” Logan said. “So did Storm and Beast. But I couldn’t have them thinking I wanted to be there. And now it’s too late.”
He didn’t wear the suit because he wanted to. He wore it because he needed to. It brought him closer to the friends he’d lost. That yellow and blue spandex was how he grieved. It was how he showed his love. It was how he remembered the fallen.
But he also wore it as penance for the guilt he carried with him over the mistakes he’d made. If a man with regenerative abilities had simply allowed himself to be vulnerable, to truly let himself be a part of the X-Men, he could have saved all his friends when the humans came for them.
Instead, as with the Wolverine from Fox’s X-Men films, he was too cool for that. So he pushed them away so much that he awasn’t there when his fellow mutants needed them. He failed them all in life. Then he failed them in death when he turned his anger and fury into a search for vengeance.
And yet, that yellow getup was also what he wore when he finally became the man Charles Xavier always thought Logan was. The professor knew the hero that resided inside Logan’s reluctant heart. When that Wolverine finally broke forth it did so through a yellow suit that also represented the best version of him.
That suit represented every mistake Wolverine had ever made, every dream he’d ever had, everyone he’d ever loved and lost, everything he’d always hoped to be, and everything he ultimately proved he was was represented by that suit. It was a symbol of the character in all his faults and glories. It was everything people have always loved about Wolverine – his depth, his contradictions, and his inherent triumph over himself. That’s why the movie had him wear his iconic superhero suit. Not because it was cool to see Hugh Jackman in it after all this time. Not because it was funny or would sell toys. He wore it for the best reason possible, because it had meaning.
We waited a very long time to see Wolverine on the big screen in his yellow and blue suit. The fact he never had was a literal joke from his movie debut. But all that waiting was more than worth it. We got something better than we’d ever hoped for because Deadpool & Wolverine made Logan’s comics-accurate suit truly worthy of the character.
