Deadpool is the biggest movie in the world right now. That’s a sentence I never thought I would ever type, but there it is. What’s more it’s a record-setting game changer that suddenly has studios falling over themselves to snap up any R-rated comic book properties to try and replicate the success of the long-delayed Ryan Reynold’s led superhero action comedy. Of course, Fox has a very easy way to replicate the success: make a sequel. Which is exactly what they plan to do.
That should come as no surprise now given the movie’s massive box office and critical reception. Collider spoke to co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick before the movie had even been released though, and they already had future plans back then. Particular regarding popular character Cable joining a potential follow-up, as was confirmed in the eventual end-credits scene attached to the film’s release.
“I think there’s a real conceptual difference between taking other characters and big things and bringing them into Deadpool’s reasonably small, gritty world and the opposite, taking Deadpool and placing him among big ensembles who are fighting aliens or in the future where he and Cable are doing something in the future.
I think if Cable and Deadpool team up, it will likely be in Deadpool’s world. That allows us to control that budgetary thing a little more; I don’t think we’re gonna see Deadpool and Cable on some far-flung planet 300 years from now because I just feel like that’s gonna be expensive, A, and will also take away from the relatability of Deadpool. I think at this stage in the game it’s about taking other people and dropping them into this reasonably insular, gritty, urban, dark world of Deadpool.”
And speaking of being expensive, one of the reasons why Deadpool essentially only had three extended action sequence was because of the restrictions of the film’s budget, which was relatively small compared to most superhero movies. And it was made even smaller through last-minute budget cuts (in the film’s final action scene, where Deadpool forgets his bag of guns in Dopinder’s cab, it’s because they could not afford to have the massive gunfight they originally planned). But now that the movie has made like bajillionty one dollars, Deadpool 2 will surely go big budget and have all these massive set pieces, right? Not quite.
“We don’t want $150 million to go make the next movie, that’s not Deadpool. Deadpool doesn’t lift cities up into the air or battle aliens coming down to earth, that’s just not Deadpool. So we’re happy in that little small budget range that they have us in; we don’t wanna blow this next one out.”
But while the budget may not balloon, you can certainly expect the cast to grow – and that’s excluding Cable – to grow to more than just Colossus and another mutant most people had never even heard of. Deadpool is Fox’s new superhero poster child, so there’s just no way in hell that the studio doesn’t have him crossing over with the other characters in their X-Men universe. But who will get the nod from the studio? Reese and Wernick have apparently been given access to Fox’s “Master List” of character they have rights to and have some ideas, but there are some mitigating factors.
“It’s a legal list but it’s also a creative list, because X-Men:Apocalypse has plans, they have plans for future X-Men movies, and we also have timeline issues. We have actors who are now playing the parts who are a younger generation, we have the older actors—where does Deadpool’s timeline fit in with the others? These are all things that Simon Kinberg worries about for the moment instead of us. Colossus was easy to do because he’s chrome and there was no live-action actor playing him, Negasonic was easy to do because she’s a very minor character, but if you start talking about Professor X or Beast you do start running into timeline issues and we’re gonna need guidelines on that.”
The likelist X-candidates would be the members of X-Force, a paramilitary offshoot of the X-Men started by Cable and of which Deadpool has been a member on multiple occasions, who handle all the dirty business that the squeaky clean and heroic X-Men can’t handle. Most importantly, an X-Force movie has already been in production at Fox for a while now, and this could be the intro that movie needs.
[Just a reminder that even though this was only published last week, Collider conducted this interview before Deadpool blew up globally and an R-rated X-Force suddenly started looking likely as well.]“[X-Force] certainly could be a path. Those decisions haven’t been made yet, but if you look at Iron Man it’s like you establish him in one movie, you do one more solo movie, and then you move to Avengers. That might be a pretty nicely prescribed path, but it just hasn’t been decided so I don’t know.”
“You’d have to have him pushing the edge of that PG-13 harder than any character in it because he does need to feel out of place in a PG-13 movie, if that makes sense. But I could see Deadpool very easily commenting on the fact that, ‘Suddenly I’m trapped in a PG-13, there’s certain things I can’t do around here.’ That could be fun for us. We get to break rules like that. Deadpool knows he’s in a movie, if he knows he’s in an R-rated movie and now he’s in a PG-13-rated movie, he’s probably gonna be frustrated by that. We would play to that, actually.”
But just more characters – no matter how cool they are – is not enough to warrant a sequel. There has to be more. Luckily Reese and Wernick had already seen in the preview screenings how positively folks were reacting to certain aspects of the first film, and hope to just keep running with that.
“People love the fourth-wall stuff, we’ve learned that. I think people appreciated the fact that the story was simple… There’s so much zaniness that I think just having a clear throughline, a pretty simple story, not a ton of plot twists or weird things you have to try to figure out or understand, makes you able to just have fun with all that zaniness that you throw on top of it. So I think we learned keep it simple, keep it zany, go ahead and break the rules in all the ways that Deadpool does, and hopefully you’re in a pretty safe space.”
“And give it a beating heart, make it feel emotional. I think the love story does that in this particular case, as it does give all that zaniness a chance to be offset by you really feeling for these characters and his journey.”
And that journey has barely begun but it’s already a hell of a profitable one! Deadpool is out in cinemas right now, and you better get to watching it!
Last Updated: February 22, 2016
