Hugh Jackman's Wolverine meme nod is hyping X-Men fans after a high-grossing weekend for Deadpool & Wolverine. On his Instagram account, Jackman posted a photo of himself in full costume lying on a bed and looking at a photo in a frame, followed by a shot of what was in the frame.
"#1 movie in the world," it reads.
The film grossed over $100 million in the U.S. alone over 24 hours and nabbed the top spot for movie earnings worldwide during its opening weekend. It reportedly broke the record for cash made over an R-rated film's first opening days as well as the best performance for a movie released in July, making over $438 million worldwide by Sunday.
The original gag is known as the Wolverine crush meme, which shows the character from the animated series X-Men from the 1990s in the same pose, gazing longingly at a photo of Cyclops and Jean Grey. In the show, he strokes the image of Grey, indicating that he has a crush on her. This occurred on episode five of season one, which aired on January 30, 1993.
In the early 2010s, someone paired two screenshots from this scene while replacing the photo of the X-Men characters with someone else, creating a two-panel exploitable meme that would grace social media for many years to come. This first appearance of the meme is rumored to have been on Reddit on September 18, 2011, but the NSFW-labeled image has been removed from the forum.
Since then, the format has been edited to show any individual, fictional character, or objection the meme creator feels affection for.
Just hours after the Hugh Jackman Wolverine meme hit the screen, Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool as his co-star in the film, created his own version of the gag for Instagram. This image shows Deadpool in his bed pining after a photo of Jackman's meme from earlier on July 28, 2024.
"I miss Hugh already," he wrote.
Deadpool having a crush on other superhero characters such as Spider-Man and Wolverine has been a running gag for some time. He has been particularly focused on other men during this era of increased acceptance for LGBTQ+ people and was previously known to chronically flirt with female characters.
Deadpool is canonically pansexual.
In addition to increasing interest in a beloved meme from over 10 years ago, an old Deadpool game became much more valuable than it was last week following the fantastic opening weekend of Deadpool & Wolverine.
The game, simply titled Deadpool, was released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Prior to last weekend, the original versions sold for around $30, while the re-release for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One was going for $50. Now, you'll be lucky to find a new copy on eBay for less than $100, or $150 for the upgraded versions.
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