Kevin Feige Turned Down Ryan Reynolds' First Deadpool 3 Pitch for One Major Reason

05/03/2024 11:41 am EDT

Deadpool & Wolverine is set to be a milestone chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, but if you can believe it, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige didn't go for Ryan Reynolds' first pitch for the film. 

In the new Empire Magazine feature on Deadpool & Wolverine, Kevin Feige reveals what the original pitch was for Deadpool 3, and why he had to reject it. 

According to Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool 3 was originally a "Rashomon story about Wolverine and Deadpool and something that they got into together, but told from three completely different perspectives," he explains. "It was a way to make a large-scale movie in a very small way."

If you don't get the reference, Rashomon is a classic 1950 film by Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa. It told the story of a Samurai, his wife, and a bandit, whose encounter resulted in murder, betrayal, and rape. However, how those dark outcomes happened is the major question at the heart of the film; the bandit and wife each recount their own versions of the story before a court, while the samurai's testimony is heard through a psychic medium since he is dead. All three versions of the story are revealed to be unreliable, with each teller idealizing themselves, and vilifying the others. It's only the account of an objective witness (a woodcutter) that gets to the heart of the truth. 

As Ryan Reynolds points out, Deadpool 3 taking the Rashomon approach would've been a way to reuse the footage of a modest-budget movie multiple times to create a "blockbuster." It's actually a pretty smart idea (from a filmmaking perspective); the only problems were that the right timing wasn't right, and the focus wasn't there: 

"The truth is, I wasn't even sure how to incorporate Deadpool yet," Feige said about the early pitches for Deadpool 3. "I was very much thinking about how to bring mutants and the X-Men into [the MCU], and I thought it needed to be more than just playing the hits. But the truth is, Ryan is an idea machine. So he may have pitched that to me, but he also pitched 25 other thoughts and ideas."

Reynolds admits that he was all over the map creatively, trying to crack the idea that would become Deadpool & Wolverine: "I wrote up about 18 different treatments. Some of them almost like a Sundance film, a budget of under $10 million, sort of using the IP in a way that they previously hadn't used, and I pitched bigger movies, and I pitched things in-between."

That Rashomon idea is something that Feige and co. may want to keep in mind for a future MCU movie – or maybe as the concept for a TV show episode, or Marvel One-Shot. Because it is, as stated, a pretty great idea for giving fans something different, on a very controlled budget. 

Deadpool & Wolverine will be in theaters on July 26th. 

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