‘Deadpool’ Writers Talk Current Status of Franchise Following Disney-Fox Merger

While answering questions for the press in anticipation of Zombieland: Double Tap, a movie they’d penned that’s slated for a release this Friday, the screenwriting team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were asked about the inevitable but still not official Deadpool 3. Why you ask? Well, because they wrote the first two Deadpool films.

According to Reese and Wernick they’re game to begin working on the third film, but they’re just waiting for confirmation, which has been complicated to an extent by the Disney-Fox merger that sent the R-rated franchise to the traditionally more family-friendly company this past spring:

Also yet to be decided upon is how exactly Deadpool fits into the rest of the MCU. Especially since they’re starting a new and massive phase post-Avengers: Endgame.

“We’re just waiting for the word from on high,” Wernick said, according to Den of Geek. “There’s a lot to be sorted out, like how Deadpool fits into the Marvel Universe with the other characters and into the release schedule of the MCU. Then it’s, do the X-Men get in there at some point? Fantastic Four? There’s a lot to be sorted out and I think we’re all getting a much needed rest from Deadpool.”

Despite the current limbo that a third film would appear to be in, Reese confirmed that another film in the series is coming, and that it’ll stay true to it’s violent and potty-mouthed roots.

“The promise is that there will be more Deadpool,” Reese added. “He will live in the R-rated universe that we’ve created, and hopefully we’ll be allowed to play a little bit in the MCU sandbox as well and incorporate him into that. We’ve just got to land on the right idea and once we do, I think we’ll be off to the races. We wake up thinking about Deadpool and we go to sleep thinking about Deadpool, so there will be another Deadpool and we just have to make it the right way.”

The two also revealed that a specific Deadpool 3 pitch was never concocted and presented to Fox prior to Disney absorbing the franchise, in part because the second film wore them out. They also knew that a Disney-Fox deal was forthcoming since a billion dollar merger isn’t usually something that occurs without some press coverage, and thus there was no point in formalizing things when a regime change was impending.

Also, now that Deadpool is owned by the same people who have the rights to just about every other Marvel hero, the two were asked about which big-name character they’d have liked to see play off of him. They stated that they thought it’d be a great idea if a straight-laced stick up his ass character could interact with Wade, but unfortunately the actor playing Marvel’s quintessential stick up his ass character is no longer in that role.

“Well, I always wanted it to be Captain America, Chris Evans as Captain America,” Wernick said. “We thought there’s no better straight foil for Deadpool, because Deadpool’s all about foils. Usually it’s the peripheral characters who are wacky and the leads are more sane. Deadpool’s so wacky, you have to surround him with more sane people – Colossus is a great example,  a stern kind of by-the-book guy. Captain America, to me it would’ve been the perfect character.

As for a replacement to the Captain, they cited Spider-Man’s youth and impressionability as being traits that could work well when crossed with Deadpool.