Shawn Levy Talks DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE Script And Bringing The Film To Life

Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Reynolds spoke with IndieWire at the end of 2024 to explain their process for creating the massive R-rated hit film. Earning 1.33 billion at the global box office, the Marvel Studios blockbuster resonated with audiences. In this post, we’ll focus on the quotes from Levy (click here for quotes from Reynolds).

“There’s this presumption, because the movie has a bouncy, naturalistic flow to it that, ‘Oh, we’re just finding it through improvisation, and we’re trying stuff out on set.’ And certainly, there’s a little bit of that, but we refuse to go into production without a script that is honestly 95 percent reflective of the movie that everyone’s seen, and it really was the outgrowth of a long, long writing process,” said Levy.

Describing the pressure to make a Deadpool film within the Marvel Cinematic Universe bubble, Levy said the movie “almost didn’t happen, because finding the Venn diagram overlap between a movie that felt authentic to Deadpool, who is an earthbound anti-hero, raw and unvarnished storytelling, pretty gritty. And then you have the MCU, which is often shiny and galactic stakes. And we tried and tried, and we were on the cusp of failure. And I actually intended to tell Marvel and Disney, “You know what, guys, it’s not happening. Let’s put it to the side. We’ll punt.”

Levy and Reynolds had a zoom call planned with Marvel head Kevin Feige that was going to put a pause on developing the film due to issues with coming up with a story. That is, until Hugh Jackman decided he wanted to return to his iconic role as Wolverine.

“The zoom that was intended to be the end of that development moment was the birth of this movie,” Levy continued. “So instead of saying, “Kevin, let’s put it to the side,” we said, “Kevin, we got an interesting phone call.” And from that phone call onward, this pairing unlocked the story for us, and it instantly became not only a Midnight Run, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles-inspired two-hander road trip, but also a movie about legacy and about two characters haunted with regret, who need each other to find redemption. And that really unlocked the writing process for us.”

A number of fans no doubt wanted the other X-Men members onscreen, but Levy said the story they wanted to tell showed constraint for the film’s benefit.

“When you have the availability of so much, it does help to enforce rigor and constraint,” he said. “We didn’t go into this thinking, “Well, let’s throw everything at the wall because we can. Let’s spend all the money because we could.” We didn’t want that. We wanted to tell this story of redemption.”

Levy said different titles like Deadpool 3 and Deadpool and Friend were considered before landing with Deadpool & Wolverine. Why not Deadpool vs Wolverine? “…we had a late-in-the-process epiphany that the arc of the screenplay is they are pitted against each other until eventually, and frankly, for audiences, satisfyingly, are joined together. So it’s “versus” that transitions into “and.”

Source: IndieWire

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