Even by the standards of opportunistic franchise cross-pollination that has fed the superhero film genre in recent years, Deadpool & Wolverine is a business merger disguised as a movie: two Marvel Comics characters previously under the jurisdiction of 20th Century Studios, now folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Disney in the wake of the company’s 2019 acquisition of Fox. What fun! For the stern, steel-fingered Wolverine, this union entails more of an identity compromise than glib jokester Deadpool – a character already well-versed in the kind of wink-wink irony the MCU trades in. Co-written by Ryan Reynolds himself, Shawn Levy’s film certainly feels a more obvious extension of the first two Deadpool films than any of Wolverine’s previous vehicles. Played with an air of grizzled get-the-job-done exhaustion by Hugh Jackman, the latter often feels like an accessory to a louder, lewder protagonist.

For an MCU that has, in its post-Avengers era, increased its focus on minority representation and inclusivity, Deadpool brings more to the table than the hetero-masculine Wolverine. Introduced into the Marvel comics stable in 1992, the character was conceived as openly pansexual. “[Deadpool’s] brain cells are in constant flux,” explained Fabien Nicieza, Deadpool’s co-creator, on Twitter back in 2015. “He can be gay one minute, hetero the next, etc. All are valid.” Citing neurodivergence to explain a character’s sexuality may not be radically progressive, but in the world of mainstream superheroism, queer fans will take what scraps they can get.

Certainly few felt particularly seen by the first two Deadpool films, which retained the character’s pansexuality in theory – but largely as a recurring punchline. The character was given a steady girlfriend in Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa, who penetrates him with a dildo in a now-infamous scene from the first film: a cautious provocation, as if receiving anal sex from a woman is a sufficiently pansexual flourish for a mostly macho male superhero, and one played chiefly for aghast laughs from the audience. Any suggestion of non-heterosexual desire is limited to asides and innuendos: a male taxi driver that he’s sweet on in the first film, and an ongoing flirtation in the second film with steely X-Man Colossus. “Don’t fuck Colossus,” Vanessa implores her boyfriend at one point. Heaven forbid.

Following his Disney rebrand, Deadpool may not stand as the MCU’s first queer superhero – that would be Phastos (played by Brian Tyree Henry), a gay man and marginal presence in the 2022 flop Eternals – but he is now their most prominently foregrounded. Anyone fearful that might mean a more earnest engagement with the character’s pansexuality can breathe easy, however: Deadpool & Wolverine picks up the previous films’ blend of progressive lip service and tentative gay panic exactly where they left off, now with added self-referencing smarm. “Pegging isn’t new for me, friendo,” he says to an opponent wielding a particularly phallic weapon. “But it is for Disney.”

The approving roar that greeted this line at my packed-out screening suggests that Deadpool’s sexuality is still pitched exactly right for a commercial audience more comfortable with treating it as an amusing quirk than as a more substantial character trait. The new film does nothing to build on its predecessors’ already scant detailing of Deadpool’s pansexuality, despite pairing him with Wolverine, a character on whom Deadpool has expressed a crush in the comic books. There’s a smattering of tame no-homo banter between them, but nothing to frighten the horses, even with the flexibility given by the film’s much-vaunted R-rating. A peripheral male character checks him out a couple of times. A key fight sequence is set to Madonna’s Like a Prayer for seemingly no other reason than that the song is beloved by the gay community, and that, I guess, is funny enough. That the film’s pansexual insinuations go no further is neither surprising nor particularly detrimental to its joyless functionality as multiplex fodder. By now, any queer viewers seriously looking to see themselves in a Deadpool film are in strenuous denial.

The film’s prudence on this front does, however, underline the queerbaiting cynicism of its marketing – which places significantly more emphasis on Deadpool’s sexuality than the finished product ever does. One poster shows a closeup of Deadpool’s gloved hand caressing Wolverine’s clawed one; another, further riffing on the pair’s Disney takeover, replicates the design of a 1991 poster for Beauty and the Beast, showing the two in a close, slow dance. This isn’t a new approach for the franchise: a poster for Deadpool 2 showed the eponymous hero lying daintily in a damsel-in-distress pose, held aloft by the hulking Colossus. The very joke of these images rests on the patent absurdity of the two characters being romantically involved, with the queer character in the traditionally feminine position.

Same-sex attraction is thus treated as little more than a gag, neither fulfilled nor corrected by the film itself. An online ad for the film’s promotional popcorn bucket, meanwhile, took the joke in a coarser direction: lasciviously fashioned as Wolverine’s open mouth, the bucket is filled with popcorn and lashings of semen-like butter. That this stunt is notably more sexual than anything Deadpool gets to do in the film goes without saying. The possibility of the two characters having sex is such an extreme possibility that it falls in the realm of promotional satire – hilarious to joke about, too shocking to contemplate. It’s a taunting akin to juvenile schoolyard homophobia, scarcely remedied by Deadpool himself being queer-identified. At this point, the next time Disney dredges up the character, it might be more progressive to draw less attention to his pansexuality. That, or simply let him fuck Wolverine.

• This article was amended on 26 July 2024 because an earlier version incorrectly stated that Josh Brolin played Colossus.