Deadpool & Wolverine Was Almost A Comedic Remake Of Thor: The Dark World

This post contains spoilers for “Deadpool & Wolverine.”

As the actor and creative force behind the Deadpool movies, actor and co-screenwriter Ryan Reynolds arguably knows the character better than anyone at this point, but before Hugh Jackman joined the cast of what would eventually become “Deadpool & Wolverine,” Reynolds and director Shawn Levy were scrambling to find an idea worthy of a third “Deadpool” film. Without Wolverine as a key player, what story were they going to tell instead?

Reynolds has previously revealed that a very early incarnation of the film would have been a “Rashomon style” road trip movie featuring Deadpool and Wolverine. But when Disney bought Fox, things got complicated and that idea fell by the wayside … well, most of it, anyway. Earlier this year, Reynolds shared that he came up with many different treatments for what the movie could be, and one of them was “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.”

In the lead-up to the new movie, /Film’s Jeremy Mathai asked producer Wendy Jacobson about the early, abandoned ideas for what a “Deadpool 3” might have looked like without Jackman’s involvement, and she explained that one of the pitches combined the low-budget notion with that road trip aspect from the previous pitch. “There was definitely a ‘Sundance-size road trip with Dopinder’ movie on the table,” she told us, referencing Deadpool’s taxi-driving sidekick character played by actor Karan Soni. But that was far from the only option being considered.

“At one point, Ryan had this idea for a ‘Thor 2’ frame-for-frame remake until the end of the first act,” Jacobson said.

I’ve gotta give it to him: “Thor: The Dark World” is objectively the funniest option for a partial frame-by-frame remake, since it’s consistently been rated as one of the worst MCU movies. I hadn’t seen the film in a while, so I fired it up on Disney+ to watch the first few minutes and imagine what a “Deadpool” version could have looked like, and I instantly laughed out loud. For those who don’t recall, the film opens with Anthony Hopkins’ voice gravely intoning, “Long before the birth of light, there was darkness. And from that darkness came the Dark Elves,” before launching into an elaborate origin story of Malekith the Accursed and the Aether. Picturing the mass confusion that would have swept over audiences had “Deadpool 3” actually opened this way makes me very happy. 

And there’s a chance we might even see a little vestige of that idea pop up in the final product, since the footage Deadpool sees in the TVA of him dying in Thor’s arms is recycled footage from “Thor: The Dark World” with Deadpool replacing Tom Hiddleston’s Loki.

The last idea Jacobson mentioned sounds like it could have been a riff on “Back to the Future Part II,” similar to what we saw during the time heist section of “Avengers: Endgame”:

“There was an idea for a deleted-scenes extravaganza where we were going to take famous MCU scenes, but show them from a different angle where you didn’t see that Deadpool got left on the cutting room floor. I mean, it was all over the place.”

That option sounds like it could have been funny, but the joke may have gotten stale if it was stretched out over an entire movie. In any case, “Deadpool & Wolverine” found a different way to give MCU fans plenty of cameos without literally taking Deadpool through a greatest hits parade of the best moments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

You can listen to Jeremy’s full interview with Jacobson and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which also features a spoiler-filled discussion about the movie itself:

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