Even before its two outstanding weekends at the box office, 20th Century Fox had greenlit a sequel to “Deadpool.” And with the movie nearing $500 million worldwide, the traditional plan would be to massively increase the budget, and make a bigger, badder, bolder followup. However, writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick don’t think that’s necessarily the right way to go with the character.
“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,” Wernick told Collider.
**Spoilers ahead** However, it should be noted the film’s climatic battle does take place aboard a helicarrier that winks at “The Avengers” universe, so it’s not like the team is adverse to big action in general. **Spoilers end**
And speaking of connecting to other superheroes (including this other tease), the most obvious step people see is Deadpool running with the X-Men, but Reese notes there’s a few hoops to jump through.
“It’s a legal list [of characters Fox has the right to] 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,” Reese explained. “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.”
And there’s also the matter of tone, because Deadpool certainly has a much different, R-rated attitude that the X-Men team.
“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,” Reese said. “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.”
As for Cable, teased at the end of “Deadpool,” and rumored to be a key player in the followup, Reese said not to expect the sequel to play in a different sandbox as a result.
“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,” he noted.
In short, the aim is to make sure not to mess with the elements that made “Deadpool” work the next time around, and that seems like a smart approach. Let us know your thoughts below. Meanwhile, checkout a VFX reel from the film, Junkie XL talking about making the soundtrack, a CBC Radio panel discussion about the movie, and Deadpool riffing on Kanye West‘s recent SNL rant.
Actually DEADPOOL was going to host back in the 90s, but then this happened. Thank god Tom Hanks was available.https://t.co/7pyPEMysdY
— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) February 20, 2016
