Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy explain how DEADPOOL 3 was almost canceled the day Hugh Jackman called

Deadpool and Wolverine made Marvel fans excited to go to the movies again. The movie was a huge success at the box office and it was just a really fun way to take it Ryan Reynoldsit’s Deadpool and Hugh Jackmannit’s Wolverine in the MCU.

But the film had a bumpy road from incarnation to release date, and was almost thrown into oblivion. That is, until Jackman made the fateful call to his friend and confided that he was ready to return to the role he had retired from many years earlier.

During a recent interview with IndieWire, Reynolds and the film’s director/co-writer Shawn Levy he explained what happened. Levy began:

“That almost didn’t happen, because finding the Venn diagram overlays a movie that felt authentic to Deadpool, who is an Earthling antihero, raw, unvarnished, pretty gritty storytelling.

“And then there’s the MCU, which often has glittering, galactic stakes. And we tried and tried, and we were on the verge of failure. And I actually meant to say to Marvel and Disney, “You know what, guys, that’s not going to happen.” Let’s put that aside. Let’s bet.’”

Reynolds chimed in, “‘We’ll get back to that later.’ We had that Zoom that day and you can’t make it up Hugh stopped on the side of the road and called I met Hugh.

“We’ve been best friends for 16, 17 years. I picked him up and he said it was like this instinctive thing: he wanted to come back as Wolverine. Ironically, my first pitch to Kevin Feige five years earlier had been a Deadpool and Wolverine movie, a Rashomon story.

“A lot of these movies have timing. He had just finished “Logan” and it was a beautiful masterpiece of film and screenplay. It didn’t feel right to him. And I respected that. But then, five years later, it seemed like the world was speaking to us in a strange way, right? Maybe we should listen.”

Levy added: “The zoom that was supposed to be the end of that moment of development was the birth of this film. So instead of saying, “Kevin, let’s put this aside,” we said, “Kevin, we got an interesting phone call.”

“And from that phone call on, this union revealed the story to us, which immediately became not only a two-way journey inspired by ‘Midnight Run,’ ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,’ but also a film about legacy and about two characters tormented by remorse, who need each other to find redemption. And that really unlocked the writing process for us.

Everything worked perfectly, and the film seemingly kicked off a new era for Marvel, ripe for a morale boost. Deadpool and Wolverine is now available to watch on Disney+.