Deadpool 2 Director Says Deadpool 3 Doesn’t Necessarily Need to Be Rated R

The fate of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool movie franchise has been one of the biggest questions hanging […]

August 6, 2019, 2:03pm

The fate of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool movie franchise has been one of the biggest questions hanging over Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox. Reynold’s take on the Deadpool character definitely isn’t of the PG-13 tone you get with most Marvel Cinematic Universe characters, so fans have been waiting to see how Disney handles that contradiction within the Marvel brand.

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Well, according to Deadpool 2 director David Leitch, there may be no real contradiction here at all: as Leitch sees it, Deadpool 3 isn’t required to keep up the series’ R-rated standard.

This is how David Leitch broke the Deadpool movie rating down to Yahoo, while promoting his new film, Hobbs & Shaw:

“It’s rated R so that’s not necessarily the [MCU] brand but he doesn’t necessarily need to be R and [Disney] don’t necessarily need to only make PG-13 movies,” Leitch told Yahoo Movies UK. “I think we’ll find a happy ground.

There’s a lot of mystery still surrounding what they want to do with Deadpool in [Disney’s] Marvel world but I think, from discussions that I’ve heard, it’s all positive. I think that they’re just trying to figure a way in as Deadpool’s hard.”

In truth, Deadpool always had a difficult upstream swim to becoming a movie star. A film adaptation of the character was something that bounced around in development limbo for years, while Ryan Reynolds waited by the phone for someone, anyone, to give him a shot at it. It was ultimately Reynolds and director Tim Miller (Terminator: Dark Fate) that took it upon themselves to create a Deadpool short film as proof of concept. Even that great bit of filmmaking was rejected, and it took a mysterious “leak” of the footage to inspire enough public support to finally sway 20th Century Fox to green light an R-rated Deadpool movie.

Since the Disney-Fox merger, we’ve seen the waters already being tested for a less mature take on Deadpool: 20th Century Fox released a PG-13 recut of Deadpool 2 titled Once Upon a Deadpool, to moderate returns. In truth, Deadpool is a character whose meta-humor and 4th Wall-breaking quips would actually allow Marvel Studios to keep the character Ryan Reynolds established running, with full winking acknowledgement that the Disney-Marvel transition has left him much tamer. Even though the change would upset core fans, the caveat of having Tame Deadpool able to play with a much wider dearth of Marvel characters would make up for it.

Upcoming Marvel Studios projects include Black Widow on May 1, 2020, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier in fall 2020, The Eternals on November 6, 2020, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on February 12, 2021, WandaVision in spring 2021, Loki in spring 2021, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on May 7, 2021, What If? In summer 2021, Hawkeye in fall 2021, and Thor: Love and Thunder on November 5, 2021.