I’ve been saying for a while now that MCU burnout isn’t happening because we’ve gotten so many of them. It’s happening because we still expect every single one of them to be an industry-smashing billion-dollar world-conquering must-see event. For whatever reason, the world simply refuses to adjust to a new status quo in which Marvel films are normal, and should be judged by normal standards.

Take Deadpool & Wolverine, for instance. It’s the third movie starring Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, after two straight home runs playing the character. We’ve got Hugh Jackman coming back to play Wolverine. It’s the first time either actor has played their signature roles since Disney bought out Fox.

On a certain level, this feels like it should be a big deal. But it bears remembering that we’re talking about freaking Deadpool here. His whole deal is self-aware wisecracking comedy making fun of himself, the fans, the greater Hollywood system, and everything around him. And on top of that, he’s been firmly established as a blood-soaked, sex-fueled, over-the-top action lead who could never be done justice with a four-quadrant PG-13 movie.

If the filmmakers are going to throw a game-changing curveball at us to deliver some huge seismic shift in the MCU, Deadpool is the absolute last character you’d want for the job. This was never going to be some pivotal event. We never needed it to be a pivotal event. We only needed it to be a raunchy, funny, irreverent action comedy like what made the last two movies so successful.

And it is certainly that… but it’s not only that.

In terms of the greater meta-narrative, this movie only really had one major job: Close the book on the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel on film. And with the exceptions of Fantastic Four (2015) and The New Mutants (But seriously, who even wants to remember those?), pretty much every Marvel film and franchise under Fox’s late stewardship gets a shout-out at the very least. Some characters are brought back with their original actors, a few old characters have been recast, there’s an actor who finally gets his shot at playing a character he tried to get on the screen for years, and we even get a “John Krasinski” moment with a fan-favorite actor auditioning for a rumored role. Hell, Wesley Snipes’ Blade gets a mention, and those movies were with New Line Cinema!

And yes, we even get a sight gag in tribute to the late Stan Lee.

I know everyone was expecting this to be some massive crossover that finally clears the way for the mutants to join the MCU. That’s not what we get. Instead, this feels more like Black Widow: A film that was made to pay a debt. It doesn’t serve much of any purpose in the grand scheme of things, but this is a movie that Marvel needed to make and it’s a film we all needed to see. Say what you will about the Marvel films that Fox cranked out over two decades (and I’ve said more than my share), but for better or worse, that was a hugely influential and prominent stretch of superhero cinema history.

So many movies and characters of the time got short shrift, cut prematurely short by corporate incompetence and/or the Disney merger. And for all the many times Hugh Jackman put on the claws, we never got to see him in the gold and blue. We never got to see him in the classic mask. There’s a very real possibility that Hugh Jackman will always be the most iconic performer to play one of Marvel’s most iconic flagship characters, but there are so many iconic aspects to Wolverine that Jackman never got to play. That just ain’t right. And we all know it.

You might call it fan service, but I call it closure. Marvel Studios could only go so much further without directly addressing the Fox merger and paying tribute to half the films that cleared the way for the MCU as we know it. And considering that there are people of legal drinking age who weren’t alive when X-Men first hit screens, I think every single one of us needed to see the mainline MCU gracefully pick up the torch and pay homage to what came before. We got that for Sony’s Spider-Man films with No Way Home, and it’s only fair we should get something similar for the Fox movies.

(Side note: Speaking of closure, I’m happy to report that the spiteful deranged bigot Ike Perlmutter has finally cashed out all his Disney shares. After so many decades, the fuckwit is totally gone at long last. One last time, all together now: One, two, three, FUCK YOU, PERLMUTTER!!!)

I’m not even gonna bother recapping the plot because it’s contrived bullshit. Even the film itself seems to know that the plot is contrived bullshit. The filmmakers openly defy all internal logic, and the only reason it works is because this is freaking Deadpool. The villains are pathetically weak, in large part because their actions are dictated entirely by the needs of the premise. Hell, I could think of at least one fight scene that ends with a pathetically lazy deus ex machina because the story needs to get back on track.

With the exception of Deadpool himself, pretty much all of the established supporting characters from the first two movies are only present for a brief scene in the beginning and that’s it. We see Deadpool applying for the Avengers — with no explanation as to how that’s supposed to work — and the scene is only there to introduce the themes of the film. It all adds to the perfunctory nature of the film, and the general feeling that everything possible got shunted into the picture out of obligation.

That said, this is still a movie made by extremely talented people, with a cast populated almost entirely of actors who’ve been playing their respective parts for years by this point. I might add that some of the fight sequences are legitimately brilliant — that opening credits sequence had me in stitches out of the gate — and the Wolverine/Deadpool fights are every bit as stupidly awesome as you’d expect. Speaking of which, I like how this movie continues the second movie’s trend of contrasting Deadpool’s physical invulnerability with his emotional vulnerability. I particularly love how Deadpool is going through all of this to try and save his friends, and then Wolverine points out that Deadpool is most likely going to outlive all his friends and loved ones by a couple centuries anyway. I kinda wish more had been done with that.

As with most MCU movies by this point, Deadpool & Wolverine is critic-proof. By now, you already know whether you’re going to see it and whether you think it’s any good. But honestly, I think that asking whether the film is good or bad is immaterial — what’s important is that this movie was necessary. We needed to see this movie, and Marvel needed to make it.

And now that it’s finally out, we need to move on.

It’s time for other actors to play these characters. It’s time for Marvel Studios to introduce and integrate their own versions of the flagship characters that were blocked off to them for so many years. And yes, it’s time to retire this iteration of Deadpool.

What sucks about the character is that he always has to be the center of attention. When he’s not onscreen, everybody has to know where he is and what trouble he’s getting into. When he is onscreen, nobody else can get a word in edgewise. We can’t move forward with Reynolds and Deadpool — or Jackman and Wolverine, for that matter — taking up all the oxygen. These characters — and so many others from the Fox era — were given their well-deserved endings with this picture. Let them have it and we can all move on.