We have heard countless times over the years that 20th Century Fox wasn’t giving ‘Deadpool’ the best budget. Sure, they’ll throw all their eggs into a doomed ‘Fantastic Four’ movie (pun intended), but when it comes to something that the fans have actually been clamoring for, the studio gets cold feet. Unfortunately, that meant that director Tim Miller, star Ryan Reynolds, and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick had to cut down on amount of cameos from familiar faces. However, they did manage to sneak in a very cool Easter egg for long-time Wade Wilson readers thanks to some creative editing.
First, we’ll talk about what didn’t make it into the movie. While appearing on Empire’s latest podcast, Reynolds shared that there were quite a few appearances from Marvel characters worked into the script originally. However, due to budgetary constraints and rights issues, they all had to be left out of the final product:
“We had endless [conversations about other X-Men]. Taskmaster was in the script originally, too expensive. We had versions where we wanted Hugh Jackman in there, we wanted all kinds of cameos from different people, but it just becomes a big mess for the studio. We went through such hell developing the script and which X-Men we could keep and which we couldn’t and it just turned into a nightmare. The studio would just say, ‘too expensive, too expensive, too expensive’ to everyone. So finally we were like well, ‘what about Negasonic Teenage Warhead’ and they said, ‘Negasonic, what?’”
Though it would have been cool to see a battle of banter between the Merc With A Mouth and the master mercenary known as Taskmaster, things worked out pretty nicely with Negasonic Teenage Wasteland and Colossus. Although, it was a little weird that no other mutants
were wandering around the X-Mansion when Wade dropped by. But now that the movie has broken a number of box office records, maybe we’ll see cameos from Wolverine, Storm, Beast, and more in the sequel.
As for the Marvel Comics cameo that did make it into the movie, it was a super tricky one. During the final battle, Deadpool pauses to talk to an old colleague named Bob that now works for Ajax as a henchmen. Wade and the character played by Rob Hayter briefly exchanged pleasantries about Bob’s wife and such. While this was a funny gag in general, it was actually a reference to Deadpool’s comic book ally Bob, Agent of HYDRA. Obviously, they couldn’t mention HYDRA since that’s a Marvel Studios property, but Paul Wernick explained to Cinema Blend that they changed just enough about the character to let him fly under the radar:
“That’s why he’s just called Bob. The hardcore fans will go, ‘Oh my God, is that Hydra Bob?’ but the lawyers at Marvel won’t go, ‘Wait, that’s Hydra Bob, they don’t have the rights to it.’ We did take some liberties. Fox has a list of characters that they own and that we can use, and Simon Kinberg, who is a producer on the project, is the keeper of the X universe. So he was a great source for us in knowing what we can use, how it’s going to play into the larger story, and overall arching stories of the X universe. So between Simon and legal, they kind of guided us to what we can and can’t do or have access to, and then it was up to us to see how we were going to use those characters creatively, once we knew we really did have the rights.”
There’s a pretty good chance that we won’t see HYDRA Bob again, but that was a really cool nod to Deadpool’s comic mythology. Not to worry though. There are already some big names being talked about for the sequel, with the biggest probably being Cable. So as we anxiously await Wade Wilson’s return to the big screen, let us know in the comments who you’d like to see the loud-mouthed anti-hero fight/maim/interact with next.
‘Deadpool’ starring Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, Gina Carano, and Ed Skrein is playing in theater now.
