After the massive success of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” $1.3 billion at the global box office, the obvious question is what a follow-up could even look like — and whether anyone actually wants to tempt fate after a victory lap like that. Director Shawn Levy isn’t announcing “Deadpool 4” on the record yet, but in a conversation on the On Film With Kevin McCarthy podcast, he admits he’s already been turning the idea over in his head and is very candid about how brutal sequels can be.
Levy gets there through a wider conversation about finales and long-running franchises, and how satisfying third movies only work when they’re cashing checks the previous films already wrote. He points to the third entries he actually loves and the way they lean on accumulated audience history. “I’m a fan of a lot of threes in the trilogies of movies,” he says. “I love ‘Back to the Future 3.’ I love ‘Return of the King.’” For him, the point isn’t that the number three is magic; it’s that the emotional payoff only lands because you’ve lived with those worlds and characters for years.
From there, he pivoted to the most obvious modern example of a franchise culmination, talking about how “Avengers: Endgame” rode a decade of setup to an enormous catharsis. He called that movie a textbook case of legacy storytelling paying off. “[‘Endgame’ was] such a superior audience experience” precisely because “that took 10 years and how many movies to earn that [Falcon and Captain America callback] ‘On your left’… and to Fox to Marvel.” In his view, those climactic crowd-pleasers worked because the audience had already done the emotional homework.
Levy then drew a straight line from those kinds of endings to his own recent work — not just in comic-book movies, but in prestige TV. He talked about how much easier it was to find juice when you weren’t starting from a blank slate. “I mean, this applies to ‘Stranger Things 5’ too,” he said. “When you are telling a story that has the benefit of legacy connection between the audience and the characters, you’re sort of like on second base already.”
That, he said, was the secret fuel inside “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Levy framed the film as consciously leaning into that accumulated affection, not pretending it was just another one-off. “When I look at ‘Deadpool & Wolverine,’ that became a love letter to that [20th Century Fox] legacy,” he said. “We were also able to tap into years of legacy storytelling.” In other words, it wasn’t just the jokes and the meta; it was the fact that the movie could plug into audience history with both Wade and Logan and let those memories do half the work.
It was when he started talking about where that left him that it became clear he was already thinking beyond the movie he’d just made. Levy admitted he was very aware fans were wondering what a next chapter might look like and said that wasn’t just a hypothetical. “I don’t know about rule of threes, ’cause the truth is, as I contemplate, for instance, ‘Okay, how do we make another Deadpool movie?’” he said. That was not a studio talking point; that was the director literally describing the question in his head.
The part that followed was even more honest. Levy didn’t try to spin the idea of doing another “Deadpool” as easy money; he basically called it terrifying. “Sequels are hard. They are dauntingly hard,” he said. “I made three ‘Night at the Museum’ movies. It kicked my ass every time.” He was talking as someone who’d already been through the franchise machine more than once and knew how quickly repetition and exhaustion set in.
That experience left him wary of coasting. Levy said the problem with going back to the well isn’t just scale or expectations; it’s the risk of hollowing out what people loved in the first place. He described the tightrope as trying not to repeat yourself while still giving audiences the core of what they want, and you can hear the tension between wanting to say yes to another “Deadpool” and being scared of screwing it up.
He was also blunt about the emotional toll of being the person in the middle of all that IP math. Levy joked that he’s now seen how the sequel machine really works, and the punch line was pretty stark. “And so, yeah, having seen how the sausage of sequels is made, I find the whole subject a little stressful because you want to get it right,” he said. That was the part he kept coming back to — not the box office, but the responsibility of not breaking a character fans had carried through multiple movies and now the MCU.
For the moment, that was where he left it: no grand announcement, just a filmmaker acknowledging he’s already wrestled with what a next “Deadpool” might be and how easy it would be to get wrong. Between the way he framed “Deadpool & Wolverine” as a legacy send-off, the bar he set with his trilogy and ‘Endgame’ talk, and the nerves he kept hinting at, the takeaway was pretty simple: if he and Ryan Reynolds ever come back for another round, it’ll be because they have a story that genuinely justifies it, not because the franchise clock says it’s time.
