During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick discussed Deadpool 2 and their Venom script. Here are the highlights:
Reese on the unspecified 2018 release date for Deadpool 2: “We’re very close to a draft that we’ll go off and shoot in a couple of months and we couldn’t be more thrilled. We don’t want to put the cart before the horse, and often times with release dates that happens. You end up racing and you end up being forced to do something you’re not happy with and the great thing about Deadpool is we spent a career trying to duck other movies. ‘How do we get off the release date of this or that?’ I think in most cases, people are going to have to duck us. Fox is probably going to be able to drop that thing on a date and everyone else is going to scatter, because no one will want to come out the same weekend … our feeling is it’s all about the movie. The fact that Deadpool came out in February and did as well as it did, and you are seeing similarly the summer [movie season] start earlier in March, and movies succeed in October and so the date to us doesn’t mean as much as it used to. I think the studio feels the same way. We just want to make the best movie possible and Deadpool will find an audience, we feel at this point.”
Reese on Hugh Jackman cameoing as himself: “Oh my gosh, that’s one we haven’t heard. That’s not a bad idea. I like that. Deadpool lives in a world where Hugh Jackman is out there. He’s got the People’s Sexiest Man Alive cover that he staples to his forehead in the first movie, so maybe he could meet Hugh as Hugh. That would be really funny.”
Wernick on their 2007 script for Venom: “We haven’t read that script in so long. We were out on the set of Zombieland and we had turned it in. That would have been 2007, 2008. … Not having read it, it’s hard. But we were immensely proud of that script. My guess is there are things if we would go back and read it, we would want to change things, but there are also things that we think, ‘Oh my God, that’s so cool.’”
Wernick on the status of Deadpool 2: “We’re very close to a draft that we’ll go off and shoot in a couple of months and we couldn’t be more thrilled.”