Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy Explain How DEADPOOL 3 Was Almost Scrapped the Day Hugh Jackman Called

Deadpool & Wolverine made Marvel fans excited about going to the movies again. The film was a major box office success, and it was just a majorly fun way to bring Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to the MCU.

But the movie traveled a rocky road from incarnation to release date, and it was almost thrown on the backburner. That is, until Jackman made the fateful call to his friend and confided that he was ready to return to the role he’d retired from many years before.

During a recent interview with IndieWire, Reynolds and the film’s director/co-writer Shawn Levy explained what went down. Levy began:

“This almost didn’t happen, because finding the Venn diagram overlap between a movie that felt authentic to Deadpool, who is an earthbound anti-hero, raw and unvarnished storytelling, pretty gritty.

“And then you have the MCU, which is often shiny and galactic stakes. And we tried and tried, and we were on the cusp of failure. And I actually intended to tell Marvel and Disney, ‘You know what, guys, it’s not happening. Let’s put it to the side. We’ll punt.’”

Reynolds jumped in, saying: “‘We’ll come back to it later.’ We had that Zoom that day, and you can’t make this up. Hugh pulled over on the side of the road and called. I’ve known Hugh.

“We’ve been best buddies for 16, 17 years. I picked it up, and he said, it was like this gut thing: He wanted to come back as Wolverine. Ironically, my first pitch to Kevin Feige five years before was a Deadpool and Wolverine movie, a Rashomon story.

“So much of these movies are timing. He had just finished ‘Logan,’ and it was a beautiful masterpiece of a movie and a screenplay. He didn’t feel like it was right. And I respected that. But then five years later, it felt like the world is speaking to us in a weird way, right? We should maybe listen.”

Levy added: “The zoom that was intended to be the end of that development moment was the birth of this movie. So instead of saying, ‘Kevin, let’s put it to the side,’ we said, ‘Kevin, we got an interesting phone call.’

“And from that phone call onward, this pairing unlocked the story for us, and it instantly became not only a ‘Midnight Run,’ ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles’-inspired two-hander road trip, but also a movie about legacy and about two characters haunted with regret, who need each other to find redemption. And that really unlocked the writing process for us.”

It all worked out perfectly, and the movie went on to seemingly jumpstart a new era for Marvel, which which ready for a boost in morale. Deadpool & Wolverine is now available to watch on Disney+.