Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick recently spoke with Deadline about Deadpool’s award season chances and their plans for the sequel:
Wernick on the film’s WGA, PGA and Golden Globe nominations: “It’s really surreal. We’re pinching ourselves. Rhett and I have always wanted to don the tuxedos, and have a prestige play, and who would have thought that this would’ve been it? Self-deprecating, self-loathing anti-hero, who makes makes fart jokes, and swears, and does bad things. The other crazy thing is, how rare is it that a movie that made $783 million is kind of the underdog of the award season? [Laughs] It’s rare that a movie like this, that’s generally considered a popcorn type movie, gets recognized among such serious, great fare. So, it’s both surprising and exciting, and unexpected, and yet, so gratifying.”
Reese on what it means for a genre film to make these kinds of waves: “I think it is a genre film, but in a lot of ways I think it feels like the anti-genre film, in that it’s very often subversive and taking the stuffing out of these big movies, as often as it is actually being one of them. It’s hard to think of it as an underdog next to smaller budgeted movies, but next to the movies it competes with, it kind of was an underdog. It was a low budget studio movie of this kind. It took six years of uphill pushing to get the movie made. It’s R-rated, it’s very meta. It takes a fair amount of chances in the space it’s in, I think, both in the way it’s told, and just the nature of the character. It’s like the little movie that could, except I guess, it’s a big little movie that could. Particularly at this time of year, when you tend to see movies that are sort of classy, and they’re message movies. They tend to have a point, and they tend to make political points, and this just couldn’t be further from.”
Reese on plans for Deapool 2: “Yeah, it’ll be a solo movie. It’ll be populated with a lot of characters, but it is still Deadpool’s movie, this next one. We’re pushing forward very hard. I think by every account we will shoot it this year, and we’re on our multiple draft now. It’s taken different twists and turns, but it’s really coalescing, and we’re very, very excited. We’re a little nervous, because now we feel like we have to live up to the first movie, but at the same time, we have to have faith, and we have an extreme passion still, and as long as we have passion still, and it’s not a mercenary, venal play, which we don’t think this is, I think we’ll be in good shape.”
Wernick on Cable’s appearance in the sequel: “It’s a world that’s so rich and we always thought Cable should be in the sequel. There was always debate whether to put him in the original, and it felt like we needed to set up Deadpool and create his world first, and then bring those characters into his world in the next one.”
Wernick on the test footage leak that got the first film greenlit: “We’ve always wondered who leaked that test footage. There’s really been only four suspects—it’s been myself, Rhett, Ryan [Reynolds], and [director] Tim [Miller], but a new suspect has emerged, and we’re gonna give you