Deadpool is a fun, ball-busting, dick joke telling, graphically violent movie. It’s a hilarious, heartwarming tale of a poor bastard who just wants to save his girl by shooting the ever loving shit out of every motherfucker that gets in his way. With a $135 MILLION opening weekend ( the highest for a hard R movie), Deadpool is also one of the most important movies in Hollywood right now, and here’s 5 reasons why.

It Doesn’t Take Itself Seriously

Everything in the world of comic books and movies seems to be going as serious as humanly possible. It’s a constant progression of one gritty reboot after another. It’s like the world of entertainment media put on its most cynical, horn rimmed glasses and decided that there should be no more fun. EVER! These people who run around in tight-pants (with clever pirate nicknames) should take no joy in their exploits. Well Deadpool gives the middle finger to that idea and then dry humps it into submission.

What Guardians of the Galaxy started—making it okay for superhero movies to poke fun at themselves—Deadpool takes to its logical conclusion. Along with breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly, Deadpool throws the entire world of comic book movies into the blender by calling out all of its ridiculous cliches. When told that he’s going to be taken to Charles Xavier he remarks, “McAvoy or Stewart? These timelines are confusing.” As he prepares to face off against the bad guy he gets school-girl giddy over her entrance. He confronts us, directly, with all of the ridiculousness of a world where spandex and machine guns are a normal thing to see out on the street. The tenor of the film has struck such a chord that studios are scrambling to replicate its success—just like Suicide Squad did by aping the tone of the trailer for Guardians. There’s even very reactionary scuttlebutt that Warner Bros.' entire expanded universe might be in a little bit of turmoil because their film slate is so serious that it may not work any more.

It Expands The X-Men Universe

Aside from The Avengers, one of the greatest pantheons in the Marvel Comics Universe is the X-men. The roster that they have is a deep bench of some of the most interesting and weird characters available for filmmakers to play with. Deadpool shows us that not only is he part of their weird world but that it’s not against steering away from the usual suspects that pop-up for cameos. Wolverine doesn’t make an appearance—a first for Fox and their X-films—though his smooth and manly undercarriage is given plenty of credit and maybe hinted that the movie got made because of all of the awful things Deadpool did to it. He did things to Wolverine’s balls to get the movie made. It’s Hollywood, these types of favors are normal.

X-panding the X-men universe is about the only thing that Fox has left on their plate in order to keep their comic book movie works going. With Fantastic Four hitting the theaters with all the fan fare of a dead fish on a hot summer day, it’s certainly time for celebration at Fox HQ that they finally hit one out of the park. Deadpool also hints in the post credits scene that Cable is on the way. Bringing Cable into Fox’s X-world opens the doors for the more hardcore and violent mutant team X-Force—the black ops arm of the X-Men school who are willing to take on the bad guys in ways that the public friendly X-Men simply can’t or won’t. If you thought the violence in Deadpool was fun then just imagine a whole team of angry, mutant vigilantes ready to break heads and scarf celebratory chimichangas.

It Was Driven by Fans

Studio executives are, by nature, small weaselly, human-esque creatures who are incapable of taking a risk to give fans what they really want in a fashion that they want it in. Every Spiderman fan was begging to see Venom on the big screen and studio executives manage to screw that up with emo-dancing Peter Parker and a very angry Eric Foreman. Everyone wanted to see Deadpool on the big screen but the first time it happened it got so screwed up that they even make fun of his X-Men Origins appearance in the new movie. The current Deadpool movie is exactly what the fans wanted and that decision had dick-nothing to do with a studio executive's idea of what would, or wouldn’t, make money.

fuck you we’re making it anyway

This film got made because the filmmakers and star believed in the character and knew exactly what fans were wanting from a Deadpool flick. They shot test footage showing their vision of the character and tone of the film and then, right before Comic-Con, decided to just leak it onto the internet and let fans do the rest. And it fucking worked! The outpouring of fan sentiment was so great that the movie was green lit with an R-rating, something that was a huge risk for the studios. Fan support means dollars in Studio speak. The more fans rally behind a property the more cash it’s gonna bring in and this outpouring for a movie that breaks the tradition of comic book films is going to help bring other, weirder and funnier, films to the big screen that were seen as too big of a risk by those weasel-people just a few years ago.

It’s Rated R

R-rated movies are seen as bad in the world of summer blockbusters because it means that mom and dad can’t take the little crumb snatchers to the movies. But there was a time when R rated wasn’t a bad thing. Robocop, Terminator, Predator, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard—these were all R-rated movies that created franchises and (thankfully) made Bruce Willis focus on ass kicking instead of his blues singing career.

somebody had to stop this

But somewhere along the way it was decided that movies needed to have wider audience appeal and the R rating was looked at as a scarlet letter that was allergic to money. The PG-13 rating took all the blood out of Robocop, all the edge out of Terminator and somehow, inexplicably, took the word “Motherfucker” out of John McClane’s catchphrase for the last two sequels (a sin that should not go unrepented); but Deadpool is going to fix that. Blood, gore, swearing and tits are all back in the motherfucking game after this last weekend and you’ll start seeing more R-rated films heading to your local cinema.

It Embraces Today’s Deconstructionist Culture

We, as a society, have reached a point where our relationship with media and the storytelling apparatus around us is so intrinsic and normal that we spend countless hours devoted to pulling the stories we see apart and tearing at the seams of their logic and consequences. We devote countless hours to gnawing on the gristle of the characters and stories we’re told and then spitting them back out in a new and twisted up fashion. Hell, that’s why I have a job writing here—because I spend way too much god damned time wondering about all the weird and stupid shit that happens off the screen as much as I do enjoying what happens on it. Deadpool not only identifies with that, he identifies with us.

His quip about “McAvoy or Stewart” references which version of Professor X Colossus is talking about—the one from the original X-men trilogy or the reboot? That “superhero landing clip” above—that’s him deconstructing the trope that we see in every superhero film.Even the opening credits of the movie mock the convention of opening credits listing things like “Crappy CGI Character” and “Produced by Asshats.” He’s hyperaware of the world around him in the same way we are. In the same way that Scream walked us through the tropes of horror films, Deadpool opens up the doors of Superhero tropes, lays them at our feet, and then pisses all over them.That’s why he breaks the fourth wall and talks to us directly, because we’re in on the joke with him. Deadpool is us...only better, stronger, sexier (kinda) and invincible.