One of Ryan Reynolds’ original ideas for Deadpool 3 was a low-budget road trip movie

The much-anticipated release of Deadpool & Wolverine is just a few short weeks away, but the movie went through many different versions before Hugh Jackman agreed to return as Wolverine. While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Ryan Reynolds revealed that one of the original ideas for Deadpool 3 was actually a low-budget road trip movie that was all talk and no special effects.

“Literally, it was a $5 or $6 million budget with no special effects. It was just a talkie-talkie road trip with me and [Karan Soni’s character] Dopinder and some of the things we collected and saw along the way,” Reynolds explained. “It wasn’t meant to be an event movie. If we’re on our way to Point C, it was meant to just get us to Point B. That was the weirdest one. I liked it. I thought it was kind of fun.” I’ll admit, that might have been kind of amazing, but I think many fans would have been starved for some of that Deadpool action.

A year after the release of Deadpool 2, Disney officially acquired 20th Century Fox, bringing the X-Men into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Reynolds was full of ideas. He pitched many of them to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, including plenty involving Wolverine, but Marvel wasn’t able to play with all their new toys right off the bat. “I don’t want to get into corporate acquisition legal laws or whatever. I don’t understand them, but there’s a lot of ’em,” Feige said. “It took a long time between whenever [the acquisition] was announced to it all getting done, so [the characters] weren’t really in our sandbox for a very long time after that first announcement happened.” Privately, Reynolds wasn’t sure if he’d ever get to play Deadpool again. “It’s not something I would’ve said necessarily publicly, but I didn’t know how a character like that would fit into that world [of the MCU],” Reynolds said.

Despite all the ideas for the third Deadpool movie, Reynolds and director Shawn Levy recently revealed that they were on the verge of pulling the plug until they got a call from Jackman. “Ryan and I were right at the edge of saying to Kevin [Feige], ‘You know what? Maybe now is not the right moment because we’re not coming up with a story,’” Levy said. “And that is the moment when Ryan’s phone rang, and it was Hugh calling from his car.“

Deadpool & Wolverine will hit theaters on July 26th.