Scrapped X-FORCE Movie Details Revealed By Director Jeff Wadlow Included Villainous Deadpool and Teenage '90s-Inspired Team
Back in 2013, Kick-Ass 2 director Jeff Wadlow was hired to write and direct an X-Force movie for 20th Century Fox. There was a little excitement building for that movie but it ultimately fell apart and the project was scrapped.
All these years later, Wadlow has revealed some details about the movie and what the story would’ve entailed. A couple of those things involved introducing Deadpool as a villain chasing down a ‘90s-inspired team of teenagers. Remember, this was three years before Deadpool would be released in theaters. During an interview with A Trip to the Movies with Alex Zane, the filmmaker said:
"I was lucky enough to write an X-Force script for Fox before the original Deadpool film was made. He'd been in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and, as a comic book fan, I knew that was a travesty. That was a total abomination. I wanted to get it right."
Wadlow went on to talk about his approach to the story saying that it would have focused on a Teenage 90s-inspired team, and the characters that he was going to include in the movie:
"My pitch for the movie was, 'If X-Men is about mutants that get to go to private school, what about the mutants that get to go to public school?' I wrote this movie that was very much inspired by the original X-Men run back in the '90s. I introduced Cable as this dark mentor for our characters. It was definitely about the young mutants formerly known as the New Mutants. In my movie, it was Cannonball, Boom-Boom, I aged Domino down...Rictor was there. Feral was there."
He went on to say, "I put them on this road movie. I modeled it after Red Dawn. They were on the run in West Texas.” As for how Deadpool was going to factor into the story, he shared:
"I wanted this antagonist chasing them the whole time. Deadpool was introduced as a villain in the original X-Force run, so I had our main villain hire a mercenary to hire this group of ragtag villains down and the mercenary hired was Deadpool. He was in motorcycle leathers with this red ballistic face mask. I made it very clear he was going to look just like he did in the comic books."
Wadlow went on to say that he wanted Ryan Reynolds in the part and he even got in touch with him and sent him a script, which he says Ryan loved. He added:
“He said it was, like, a grand cameo for Deadpool. It was a supporting part. I played him as an antagonist but, ultimately, they turned him in the end."
Wadlow initially had a "three-movie" arc in mind which "took X-Force from what it was in the 90s with Rob Liefeld with a band of kids fighting for what they believe in, and then by the third film, the group would have grown and changed and lost and picked up some new members, and basically turned into Rick Remender's version of the X-Force in the early 2000s."
It sounds like that would’ve been a really fun and cool X-Force movie! It’s kind of a shame it didn’t happen. But, at the same time, had it happened we may have never got that Deadpool solo film. So many factors about this X-Force movie might have squashed that movie from being made. But, thankfully, everything worked out great and now fans are excited waiting for Deadpool & Wolverine to be released in theaters.
Would you have liked to see this X-Force movie get made?