R-rated. Violent. Profane. Irreverent. Fourth-Wall breaking. Meta. Insanely inventive viral marketing.
These are just some of the buzz words and phrases stupid people in Hollywood are going to be throwing around over the next year as they make their pitches for the next Deadpool. “It’s just like Deadpool, but with [insert the minor things which will make it different]” will become a common phrase in board rooms the same way “it’s just like Die Hard, but with ..” was in the late ’80s and “it’s just like The Matrix, but with…” was in the early ’00s. However, none of those Die Hard knockoffs knew how to create the next John McClane just as all of those Matrix knock-offs thought the key to success was “bullet time and pleather outfits.”
It’s inevitable, really. This is a pattern which repeats itself throughout Hollywood history. When a movie breaks as many box office records as Deadpool it will be hailed as a game-changer, but if none of the people in positions of power actually understood the movie or its success then we’re doomed to a series of cheap imitations.
-Geese, man. The movie’s only been out for four days. Can’t we just enjoy the moment?
No, damn you. Just earlier today, Fox announced Wolverine 3 will be R-Rated, and there’s speculation that Warner Bros. and Suicide Squad director David Ayer might re-think their current editing plans and amp up the movie’s language, action and attitude. Deadpool’s massive success has come so early in the year that it could actually impact superhero movies we’ll see later this year. Well, not so much Batman v Superman and Civil War and probably not Apocalypse, but who knows about Suicide Squad, Gambit and Doctor Strange.
Sidenote: Holy crap, there are a lot of comic book movies this year.
Second Sidenote: There’s no way Gambit makes that 10/7 release date, right? They’re not even filming yet.
Gambit, or Chambit, if you’re nasty
If Deadpool must be mimicked, though, its imitators should realize that one of the biggest gifts Fox gave Ryan Reynolds, director Tim Miller and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland) wasn’t the freedom of an R-rating. Instead, it was the limitation of a $58 million budget.
Let me walk that back for just a second. Deadpool is a character who demands an R-rating, and Fox taking the gamble on breaking from the pack and making a major, non-PG-13 superhero movie is why this movie exists. However, a large part of the reason why this movie is so good is because Fox forced the filmmakers into a box.
If you force limitations on a filmmaker and challenge them to tell their story on a very specific scale but ultimately trust them enough to then back off and let them do their thing you get Deadpool. Or you get a total garbage fire because you seriously nickel and dimed them on the budget and hired a director you never should have. But, um, never mind about that. When it works, you get Deadpool.
For proof of this, you need only read the original Deadpool script from 2010 which has been widely available online for several years. Reese and Wernick had to remove $7 million worth of action scenes from this script script before Fox would give them the greenlight, but now that Deadpool‘s here DenOfGeek and WhatCulture looked back at the script to see what could have been. Almost all of the budget-based cuts actually improved the final film, a fact backed up by Ryan Reynolds in his recent spoiler-special podcast interview with Empire Magazine.
For example:
-Similarly, Negasonic Teenage Warhead wasn’t in the original script. It was just Colossus, and Fox wouldn’t let them add any other X-Men until Ryan Reynolds asked them about Negasonic Teenage Warhead. The way Deadpool says, “What the shit?” the first time he hears her name is actually taken exactly from how the Fox executive sounded upon being asked if they could use Negasonic in the movie. Fox had never even heard of her.
-After being diagnosed with cancer, Wade originally traveled the world in search of a cure, ending up in Mexico where he initially fell for a scam before instantly pulling the shady doctor’s heart out of his chest. Removing this for budgetary reasons forced them to re-evaluate Vanessa’s reaction to the cancer. Initially, she had no real reaction, but in the film she’s the one who moves straight into fix-it mode, causing Wade to fall even further in love with her and enhancing his desperation to find a cure so that he can be with her.
-Francis was originally meant to have a trio of comic book-based sidekicks, Garrison Kane, Sluggo and Wyre, all three of them dudes starring in multiple expensive action scenes. They were all cut and replaced with a single henchwoman, Gina Carrano’s Angel Dust, which actually simplifies the story while also upping the number of female characters. Her gender even adds more layers to Colossus’ big fight scene, which would have originally been him against Sluggo in an epic, but far more standard brawl.
-Sister Margaret’s School was to be run by a Sam Elliott-type named Patch, thus leaving T.J. Miller’s Weasel with little reason for being there. Excising Patch from the script for budgetary reasons and shifting more attention to Weasel streamlined the story.
-Francis and Deadpool’s freeway fight scene was supposed to be much longer, at one point involving them fighting inside a house being transported on the back of a lorry. That was simply cut entirely, and would have felt gratuitous.
-Similarly, the finale of the film was meant to take place in an actual building instead of an old aircraft carrier. There were pages and pages of extreme violence in this section of the script, showing us exactly how Deadpool used each and every one of the guns he brought with him in the duffel bag. However, Reese says that Fox’s budget demands forced them to think of something more creative. As such, Deadpool still kills a bunch of guys and uses their bodies to spell out Francis names, but he does so using his katanas because he left the bag of guns in the Taxi. That’s actually much more interesting and certainly a lot funnier. Personally, him leaving the guns in the Taxi is one of my favorite moments in the movie.
Maybe some of those changes would have been made without the budget limitations, but the original Deadpool script reads like something written by a couple of guys who can’t believe they’re getting to make an R-rated comic book movie. Fox’s budget cuts forced them to remember that they also have to make an actually good movie, not just one with a Death Wish-esque body count.
In the wake of Deadpool’s success, that part of the film’s winning formula might be overlooked. Even if it’s not, the other studios might not be able to follow Fox’s ultimately stand-offish example of letting the Deadpool people do their thing just so long as they came in on time and on budget. When asked how Fox felt about making a movie in which the hero blows the bad guy’s brains out at the end, Reynolds half-seriously told Empire that he’s not 100% sure that everyone at Fox even read that far into the script. They were more concerned with making sure none of the non-approved X-Men showed up. They’ll definitely be more inclined to read the Deadpool 2 and X-Force scripts currently in the works.
For that reason and so many others, it is going to be challenging to truly replicate Deadpool. But making smaller bets with more modest budgets is a good place to start.
