Everything Is So Different When You Rewatch Deadpool 2 Now
It was a whole lot of fun watching Deadpool 2 in theaters, but since it’s been a few years, many aspects of the film come across differently nowadays. From celebrity cameos to deleted scenes, there’s a lot of other movies that you may not have noticed the first time around.
At the beginning of Deadpool 2, Wade Wilson is on top of the world. He’s reunited with his soul mate Vanessa, and the two plan to start a family, but they’re tragically torn apart when she’s killed by a stray bullet meant for her boyfriend. Vanessa’s death shapes the tone of the movie and Wade’s character arc as he sees visions of her that he interprets as encouragement to help Russell. However, Deadpool 2 has been criticized for making Vanessa a victim of “fridging.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s basically a plot device where a female character is put in peril because the plot requires it. Did you ever see Commando? It’s like that. Think Alyssa Milano with Arnie as her dad, saving the day at the end. Director David Leitch doesn’t believe that Vanessa was “fridged” because the character emotionally underlines the whole movie.
But in truth, Vanessa was initially never supposed to die at all, Leitch admitted on the audio commentary. We had versions where they broke up and she left him instead of dying. According to Ryan Reynolds, the whole tone of the movie would have changed if Vanessa had lived as they might have actually had a child. In the end, Leitch felt her death was best for Deadpool’s narrative, as he wouldn’t have had quite the same motivation if Vanessa had survived in the original Deadpool. Fighting Francis probably would have gone a lot smoother if there were more than three mutants present to take him out. Before the big battle though, Wade makes sure the audience knows exactly why we shouldn’t expect to see mega popular mutants like Wolverine or Cyclops this time around before the climax of Deadpool 2. However, this is proven not to be the case. Six of the most iconic members of the X-Men are clearly present in the X mansion, it’s just that they just don’t want anything to do with Wade. As annoying as Deadpool can be to deal with, an attack on an orphanage probably warranted some assistance from the more popular members of the superhero team. So why didn’t they show up?
Once again, the answer is more about behind-the-scenes limitations than plot holes. None of the X-Men were actually able to appear on the Deadpool 2 set because they were busy shooting Dark Phoenix at the time. That’s with many elements in today’s superhero movies. The cameo was added via green screen, which means that Ryan Reynolds never actually got to hang out with James McAvoy and Evan Peters during production, Peters recalled to Cinema Blend. We had a lot of different versions for when they opened that door and turned to us, but the one they used was pretty chill.
Whether he’s stranded on Mars or buying a zoo, it’s always a pleasure to see Matt Damon on the big screen. Even though he has yet to play a big shot superhero like his buddy Ben Affleck, Damon has taken the opportunity to appear in multiple Marvel movies. In 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, Damon portrayed an Asgardian actor in the role of Loki, and a year later he put on some prosthetics to play a hillbilly who doesn’t believe in the hygienic value of toilet paper. Details of Damon’s cameo were kept under wraps and while his team partner Alan Tudyk is named in the credits, Damon isn’t.
He’s credited as Dicky Greenleaf, which is a reference to The Talented Mr. Ripley and the identity that his character steals in that film. His cameo wasn’t publicized or talked about in interviews until after the movie was released, and plenty of viewers missed that it was him the first time around. Most of the cast and crew members were kept in the dark as Reynolds and Leitch did everything they could to keep it hush-hush. Reynolds, who co-wrote Deadpool 2, pitched the idea for the toilet paper scene over dinner. Director Leitch later admitted to Collider, “We didn’t even tell the crew his name wasn’t on the call sheet. It was a fake name. Nobody really knew what that scene was about. They were like, why are we shooting these two rednecks? We just didn’t tell anybody.”
Once Cable arrives in the present, Deadpool assembles the X-Force in order to stop him from harming Russell. The invisible hero Vanisher joins the team but quickly meets his untimely demise after strong winds blow him into electrical cables and ZAP him to a crisp. It’s only as he’s electrocuted that Vanisher becomes visible, and once he is, he’s revealed to be played by Brad Pitt. “You guys look amazing. Banisher,” he quips. “I have no doubt. You look amazing too.” If you get the chance to put Brad Pitt in your movie, you should probably put him in your movie, even if it’s for less than 3 seconds of screen time. Pitt had originally been in the running to play Cable, but backed out due to a scheduling conflict. Even though Josh Brolin ended up playing the futuristic warrior, David Leitch told Collider that Pitt still really wanted to be involved in the franchise. He recalled, “He kind of left the door open when we left that meeting. Like, if you guys ever need anything, give me a call. I’d love to be involved,” and Ryan just said, “Oh, I have an idea.” So he started to think about what it could be, and the Vanisher thing was perfect. The only thing that Pitt requested his compensation for his appearance was a single cup of coffee.
While Matt Damon and Brad Pitt’s cameos were two of the most notable in Deadpool 2, it’s probably Stan Lee’s that was the most anticipated. Late in his life, the Marvel Comics co-creator made a number of cameos in the MCU and other Marvel-based films, but his Deadpool 2 appearance wasn’t what viewers were expecting. Unlike in the first movie where Lee played a strip club DJ, his appearance in the sequel was purely 2 dimensional. Deadpool 2 celebrates Lee with a giant mural which can be seen when Domino is parachuting into the city. David Leitch explained to Collider, “The colorful graffiti was included in the movie because scheduling issues precluded them from shooting Lee in the flesh,” he elaborated. “We’re always aware that you want to get a Stan Lee appearance in there, but it was more like what would work and what was the time and place? And our schedule was tight and things got away from us. So by the time we were done with the movie, we were thinking, where could we plug him in during reshoots?” Leitch noted, at the time, that Lee’s absence was due to his rumored ill health. Sadly, Lee’s health did begin to decline and he passed away just a few months after the release of Deadpool 2. His last ever cameo was in Avengers: Endgame.
When it was announced that Domino would be a featured character in Deadpool 2, some fans were left wondering how exactly the film would portray her power of perfect luck. It seems that Ryan Reynolds noticed this because Deadpool’s rant during Domino
‘s attempt at saving Russell makes that exact point in a pretty ironic way. In fact, Deadpool is so insistent that Luck isn’t a superpower that he mugs the person who came up with the idea in the 1st place. His insult doesn’t make much sense unless you’re familiar with the source material, though. So who actually is a guy who can’t draw feet? That would be Rob Liefeld, comic book veteran and co-creator of the characters Deadpool, Domino, and Cable. Liefeld is infamous for avoiding having to draw feet as much as possible in his work, even though many other artists in the medium have followed his lead over the years. Ryan Reynolds reached out to clear the joke with Liefeld, who, despite the implication that he smokes crack, was thrilled to be included in the movie. He told Inverse, “There’s no greater shout-out in the world.”
Deadpool 2 was full of surprises when it first came out, one of them being the presence of the supervillain Juggernaut. This wasn’t the underwhelming Juggernaut from X-Men: The Last Stand either. This was a fully CGI behemoth capable of ripping Deadpool in half like a Twinkie, but who could play such a beast of a man? Just like Mike Myers and Austin Powers. Ryan Reynolds plays both the anti-hero and the villain, but he wasn’t actually supposed to do it, and he isn’t named as a voice of Juggernaut in the credits. After Deadpool 2 was released, Reynolds revealed to Empire that he had just been standing in until they could find the more suitable voice actor, which never ended up happening. As he puts it, “I just did it as a kind of temp. It was this sort of Brooklyn brawler voice that we modulated in post and cranked up and gave it all this base and reverberation. We didn’t settle on that just because it was quality. We settled on that because we just didn’t have any more budget left for other actors to jump in.” David Leitch ended up doing motion capture for Juggernaut’s face, which was brought to life thanks to the work of talented VFX artists.
In nearly every single time travel movie, tampering with the past has disastrous consequences in the present. Deadpool 2 is one of the rare exceptions armed with Cable’s time travel device. Wade makes some pretty major changes to the timeline with seemingly no ill effects. At least not until Deadpool and Wolverine, that is. He saves Vanessa by killing her attacker with a cream cheese spreader, takes out the mute version of Deadpool from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and puts a bullet in Ryan Reynolds’ head before he can start production on Green Lantern. It’s a pretty happy ending overall, and it creates a clear path for a backdoor in to appear in Deadpool 3 as a mutant superhero copycat. However, Deadpool 2 almost had a completely different, darker ending. Co-writer Rhett Reese said, “The team was initially happy with their decision to kill Vanessa off without resurrecting her,” Reese told CBR. “We originally did not save her. It was interesting. We thought we might have to save her with The Time Machine because the audience would be mad at us, but they were accepting of her being dead.” Bringing Vanessa back was ultimately a last-minute decision as they felt it was the best fit for the story and the future of the franchise. When they called Baccarin up to let her know, she was very receptive to the news.
One of Wade’s time-traveling adventures that didn’t make it into the theatrical release of Deadpool 2 involved him going back in time to kill Adolf Hitler as a baby. In the deleted post-credit scene, he’s ready to unleash hell on the newborn infant, but he starts to struggle with the decision. He eventually decides to let Cable do the dirty work for him. “I think we both know I don’t have what it takes to do this.” The scene was eventually released as part of the Super Duper Cut on August 28, 2018. Ryan Reynolds told The Hollywood Reporter that it caused debate behind the scenes, saying, “I always loved it because it created the same debate in our edit room as it does in the streets of the world. It was debated back and forth and over and over again. We were all a little nervous about it, wondering is it too much. In the end, none of us could come to a consensus on how to handle it. So our final decision was to just not handle it, to just not put it in the movie.
