How Deadpool & Wolverine Almost Featured Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man

Everyone and their mother knows the news that Robert Downey, Jr. will be making his epic return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday” — not as Tony Stark, of course, but as Doctor Victor Von Doom himself — but, had things unfolded a bit differently, we could’ve seen the OG Avenger pop up even earlier in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Obviously, the one thing the Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman team-up movie was missing was even more cameos, but there’s a certain amount of logic behind this near-miss attempt to spice things up. And, in a neat wrinkle, /Film can independently confirm that we heard this through grapevine back in April of this year.

In a recent interview with IndieWire, “Deadpool” writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick spilled the beans on the Downey, Jr. cameo that wasn’t to be. According to both, it would’ve happened during the early scene with Reynolds’ Wade Wilson in his job interview with Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan. Wernick and Reese confirmed that they’d originally written that scene with both Downey, Jr.’s Stark and Favreau’s Happy in mind … but, unsurprisingly, Marvel’s other plans in the works ended up preventing that from happening. As Wernick told it:

“Behind the scenes, we didn’t know about the Doctor Doom [plans]. And there’s no way he was going to do both. And then we said, ‘Oh, Downey doesn’t say ‘No’ to Ryan Reynolds, does he? No one says no to Ryan Reynolds.’ And Ryan gave him the hard press. We wrote scenes, and Downey read the scenes, but what we didn’t know behind the scenes was this Doctor Doom thing.”

In retrospect, however, maybe this was a blessing in disguise. The pair went on to explain how this major cameo would’ve been little more than a throwaway gag.

Desperate or not, Robert Downey, Jr. was always going to take a victory lap and come back to the franchise he helped build in the first place, so it was simply a matter of whether to burn that reappearance on a mere punchline … or save it for something truly special. Marvel and Kevin Feige clearly opted for the latter over the former, since Tony Stark was nowhere to be seen in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” It wasn’t due to a lack of effort on the part of director Shawn Levy, Ryan Reynolds, or writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, however. Later in their interview, Reese went on to lay out exactly how this alternate scene between Wade, Happy, and Tony would’ve gone down:

“It was a version of what you saw, in the sense that he rejected Wade. He just said he wasn’t a team player or whatever and questioned his team-player abilities. So it was actually pretty close to the scene that you saw. It just had two guys instead of one. And then Jon [Favreau] was, graciously, connected to it from the start. It worked out great. I mean, look, we would’ve loved to have Downey. But, at the same time, I think Marvel had this ace in their hole, which is he’s about to come back in this different character. So, to have him be Tony Stark? Knowing that Doctor Doom was coming on the heels of that? It just didn’t make sense.”

The movie hangs a lampshade on Downey, Jr.’s larger-than-life presence as Stark, naturally, when Wade quips that Happy was there instead of “the big man” only because Marvel would’ve shell out on an A-list cameo. As it turns out, the truth was more complicated.

Just when you thought “Deadpool & Wolverine” couldn’t have packed any more recognizable superheroes into the action, Reese and Wernick dropped one last bombshell over the course of the IndieWire interview. This has to do with the same scene set at Stark Tower a few years in the past, when the Avengers were all still together and notable figures such as Tony Stark and Chris Evans’ Captain America weren’t, you know, dead and retired, respectively. Audiences were pretty pleased to see Happy return in his full persnickety glory, but that could’ve only been the first of several major cameos in that one sequence … had the writers gotten their way, that is.

Wernick revealed that, at one point, they envisioned this scene to involve all of the Avengers in the same room, hilariously enough. As he explained:

“We haven’t told anybody this, but there was a version of that scene very, very early on that wasn’t written, but was conceived, that had all the Avengers in the room. And Wade was rejected and then he dressed all the Avengers down in a way only Deadpool could do.”

Can you even imagine? Reese chimed in to point out that, “[Wade] was going to get mad and basically attack each one of them in a vicious kind of way,” which likely would’ve involved some incredible one-liners and awfully off-color insults. Of course, this would’ve necessitated some serious scheduling problem-solving on the part of Marvel, to say nothing of figuring out how to allow for one more cameo appearance in each of the star’s contracts. There’s probably a good reason why this was ultimately abandoned (though at least Evans managed to appear as Johnny Storm).

“Deadpool & Wolverine” is now playing in theaters.