Deadpool & Wolverine is being hailed as a Marvel masterpiece and is tracking to open as the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever — and it nearly never happened. Ryan Reynolds spent years trying to convince Hugh Jackman to reunite Deadpool and Wolverine for the first time since their much-maligned X-Men spinoff in 2009, only for Jackman to hang up the adamantium claws with 2017’s Logan. It seemed that Jackman’s time as the berserker mutant was dead and buried (literally). And then Jackman made the fortuitous phone call that changed everything.
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As legend goes, Reynolds and director Shawn Levy were developing Deadpool 3 under Disney-owned Marvel Studios following the 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox (which produced 11 X-Men movies and the two Deadpool movies). After a series of pitches — everything from a talky low-budget road trip movie to one featuring the demon Mephisto as its villain — Reynolds and Levy were about to walk away from Deadpool 3. That’s when Jackman called Reynolds to ask if it wasn’t too late to come back.
“I would have been upset,” Jackman told MTV News when asked what might have happened had Reynolds and Levy went a different direction. “Every cell in my body was like, ‘I really want to do it.’ So I would have been heartbroken, I would have cried, I would have been angry. I probably would have ended the friendship, and filed for custody of his children.”
With Jackman now on board — and with producer Kevin Feige’s blessing — Deadpool 3 was pruned, banished to the Void where branched timelines go to die. Reynolds could make the movie he wanted to make all along: Deadpool & Wolverine.
“What kind of idiot would, no matter what the circumstance is, not try to figure that out?” Reynolds said. “Someone who’s deathly allergic to success, happiness?”
It was during a recent fan event where Reynolds recounted how Deadpool & Wolverine — which, as the title suggests, is a Deadpool and Wolverine movie and not Deadpool 3, according to Levy — hinged on Jackman’s phone call.
“I had met Kevin Feigesix years ago to discuss this, and the first thing I said to him, ‘Ijust want to make Wolverine and Deadpool together. I just want these twotogether on screen.’ At the time, Kevin said, ‘Forget it. It’s nevergoing to happen,’” Reynolds said. “I said, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’As we marched inexorably forward, Shawn and I were coming up withdifferent pitches and different ideas, and we pitched Marvel everythingyou could imagine — little movies, big movies, anything — and it wasn’tworking out.”
He continued, “And then one day, we were on our last pitch. We wereabout to say to Kevin Feige, ‘I think we’re going to walk away and we’llcome back later, maybe in a couple years, when we have a better senseof things.’ And Hugh happened to call me. Shawnand I just pivoted in the middle of our pitch to Kevin and said, ‘Look,this thing just happened. It seems kind of miraculous. Hugh called me,what do you say?’ And for some reason, Kevinimmediately said yes.”
Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine — which also features returning Deadpoolcast members Morena Baccarin (Vanessa), Leslie Uggams (Blind Al), KaranSoni (Dopinder), Brianna Hildebrand (Negasonic Teenage Warhead), ShioliKutsuna (Yukio), Stefan Kapičić (Colossus), Robe Delaney (Peter), Logan‘sDafne Keen (Laura/X-23), and Matthew Macfadyen (TVA Agent Paradox) andEmma Corrin (Cassandra Nova) — is in theaters Friday.
