Warning: This post contains mild spoilers for Free Guy
Ryan Reynolds stars in Free Guy, where a non-playable video game character discovers he can break his programming and attempts to make more of his life.
During the course of the film a very minor character mentions Thanos and the infinity gauntlet which tells us that the MCU does indeed exist in this world. From a behind the scenes perspective, this is a 20th Century Studios production which means it’s owned by Disney and that means the rights issues are far less complicated than if the film was produced by someone else.
In the film’s climax, Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is faced with a jacked-up version of himself known as the Dude who he clearly doesn’t have the strength to defeat. But then he scrolls through the weapons available in the game and selects ‘shield’, blocking a killer punch. The camera pans around to reveal the front of the shield and it turns out it is Captain America’s shield and The Avengers theme plays on the score.
This in itself is a fun nod but then something even more brilliant happens. The world is watching as this non-playable character tries to survive and it turns out that Chris Evans, who obviously played Steve Rogers in the MCU, is also tuning it and shouts “what the shit?” after seeing the shield moment. It’s great that Evans agreed to do this and perhaps is a sign that he’s still willing to be connected to Captain America even if he probably isn’t going to play him again on screen anytime soon.
Guy also gets a brief opportunity to use a Hulk arm to land a punch on the Dude before then using a light-saber from Star Wars and then an assortment of weapons from video games.
It’s fun to see elements of the MCU used in a different property and shows one of the advantages of one company holding the rights to so many intellectual properties. I assume that the team at Marvel were very strict about what Free Guy could use and probably wouldn’t let any characters be used in this context but it’s nice to see they are willing to let this stuff be used in the right way. Of course, the use of these items in the games plays off the idea of Marvel characters/items appearing in real games, like the memorable period when Thanos was a playable character in Fortnite.
It’s interesting to note that this isn’t just any actor playing with the Marvel stuff, it’s Ryan Reynolds who plays Deadpool. We’ve been waiting to here for some time now how/when Deadpool will join the MCU with the latest reports suggesting the next Deadpool film will start filming pretty soon. The Marvel links in Free Guy, as well as that now infamous reaction video of Deadpool and Korg to the film’s trailer, suggests that Reynolds is developing a good relationship with Marvel Studios and this is really promising for Deadpool’s future. Hopefully we will see some Deadpool appearances in future MCU films and the studio will really let the next Deadpool film really play with this universe.
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