The Marvel Cinematic Universe is now opening its doors and its arms to welcome Deadpool in Deadpool & Wolverine. Before Disney purchased 20th Century Fox, Fox’s Marvel playground was the X-Men franchise. They could give a team member spin-offs, like Wolverine’s solo series, or explore a different facet of mutant-kind with a film like The New Mutants. Before the Deadpool movies with Ryan Reynolds took off, there was actually another version of his story that was planned involving the X-Force team getting their own movie.
According to ScreenRant, Jeff Wadlow, director of Kick-Ass 2, recently appeared on A Trip to the Movies with Alex Zane. He revealed his scrapped plans for an X-Force movie that would have had Ryan Reynolds redeem the interpretation of Wade Wilson from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This project was one of many canceled explorations into the X-Men universe, such as Channing Tatum‘s solo Gambit movie.
Wadlow explained, “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. 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. I put them on this road movie. I modeled it after Red Dawn. They were on the run in West Texas.”
He continued, “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. I wanted Ryan [Reynolds] to play the part…I got in touch with Ryan, got him the script and he loved it. 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.”