Fitting Deadpool in the MCU seems like an obvious choice now, but it turns out, it was a bit of a difficult journey. And Kevin Feige actually turned down 18 treatments and 25 different ideas from Ryan Reynolds before the pair settled on the best way to get Deadpool into the fray. Feige shared with Empire, “The truth is, I wasn’t even sure how to incorporate Deadpool yet… 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.”
And Reynolds meanwhile noted, “I went back to the drawing board, and 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.” So many Deadpool movies that could have been. But that makes us even more excited for Deadpool & Wolverine—we guess it must be just right.
And if nothing else, this teaches us to always try, try again. We can’t imagine being turned down by Kevin Feige 18-25 different times, but Ryan Reynolds shows us persistence pays.
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