Deadpool Opening Titles Layout Director Reveals How They Came Together

At Silicon Valley Comic Con, Blur Studio Layout director Franck Balson was asked about the opening titles of Deadpool, and Comicbook.com was on site. The title sequence, frozen on a car accident mid-accident… that’s not so accidental. Meanwhile, the cast and crew are introduced not by their names, but by inventive and hilarious titles.

“The idea for the title sequence was actually already in the script from the very beginning, at least the main part: frozen moments in the middle of this f***ed up car accident,” Balson revealed. “The one thing that wasn’t in there – originally, the titles were supposed to be actual titles, with actual actors’ names and stuff like that.”

So why the funny titles? Well, they were just placeholders at first.

“Very early on in the process, Ryan was the only one who had been cast at that moment, and we started working on the pre-vis for the whole film; we started working on that sequence because it was going to define that whole car chase,” he said. “It needed to finish exactly in this freeze-frame moment and look good. We looked at different ways to put the guys, and were just going, ‘Okay, that’s a really cool thing to have.’ At the time, since we didn’t know who was going to be in the movie, I was like, ‘okay, what do we have? So we have the Hot Chick, the bad guy, the CGI character,’ and just put all those names in there.”

Of course, as things do during a movie production, the title sequence got put on hold – and suddenly it was time to make it final.

“When we started replacing the names, [director] Tim [Miller] was showing it to Ryan, the writers, and the producers, and they said ‘you know what? I think we’re gonna go with what you had before, the one with the Hot Chick and stuff – it’s funny!’ And that’s how that got in the movie!” Balson said with a laugh. He did say that the writers “came back in” and helped them maximize the laughs on the sequence.

Tim Miller is the co-founder of Blur Studio, and his team was involved with Deadpool‘s production from the moment they created the test footage. After its leak helped push the movie forward, the team worked on effects and supplementary footage for the film, as well as Miller directing it.

Deadpool is in theaters now.