Rob Liefeld Says He Doesn’t Get Why There Isn’t a Deadpool Cartoon Yet

It’s almost ancient history at this point, but even before The Walt Disney Company owned 20th Century Fox they were in business together with work on a Deadpool animated series for FX, in addition to the critical darling Legion. Brothers Donald and Stephen Glover, the creative team behind the award winning Atlanta, were to bring the Merc with a mouth to the network but after about a year of development it was suddenly and quickly cancelled. As you might expect, Deadpool’s creator Rob Liefeld is among the many who can’t believe the project didn’t work but also that an animated Deadpool hasn’t happened at all. As he says in a new interview, I don’t understand it.

“What I don’t really understand is, given the audience, why there isn’t a Deadpool cartoon yet. Like, I don’t understand that. Right?” Liefeld told Collider in a new interview. “I can tell you stories, that was a gut punch. It was like two and a half years ago and I’m still not over it.”

Back in 2017 when the series still seemed incredibly likely, FX CEO John Landgraf had high praise for it and noted that it would have a very different tone than the Deadpool movie that was just a year old at the time.

“It’ll be really different from the movies,” Landgraf said previously. “It’s animated and they’re live-action, but also it has a different tone and editorial voice as evidenced by Donald and Stephen Glover, who have their own voice and tone. We really wanted to make something that was distinctly different from the movies.”

Landgraf also opened up about the reason behind the show’s cancellation, revealing that the series the Glover brothers wanted to make wasn’t what Marvel wanted and that they cancelled the series rather than the network pulling the plug.

“They didn’t want to do the show that Donald and Stephen [Glover] wrote,” he said during the TCA summer 2018 tour. “We would have done the show that Donald and Stephen wrote, but it wasn’t our decision. When Marvel decided not to do that show, we parted company with them, as did Donald and Stephen.”

Stephen Glover later chimed in on the subject after it had been shelved for a few months, writing in a series of since deleted tweets,”Our show wasn’t too black…It wasn’t really that black at all. But we definitely wanted to give Rick and Morty a run for their money and I think we would have. Proud of the gang.”

He also alluded to an entire episode they wrote poking fun at pop singer Taylor Swift, which he described as “The last straw.”