Deadpool & Wolverine was an unprecedented installment to the MCU, which up to that point reined in its films’ explicit violence and vulgarity. Ryan Reynolds confirmed they were allowed to go all out with the script, except for one joke that did not go well with the higher-ups at Disney.
Ryan Reynolds said there’s at least one joke he wrote for Deadpool & Wolverine that was deleted from the film. Speaking at an influencers event in New York, the actor hinted he replaced that line upon Disney’s request, and that was the right call in retrospect. “There was only one line in the entire film that they asked me to take out,” he said (per Deadline). Quelling the growing curiosity among the audience, he asserted “No. No. No! And they were right!” Reynolds clarified that Marvel and Disney were “such great partners” during the film’s development, which was opposite of his initial expectation that the companies would be “like a red-line lawyer on every page.”
Reynolds hinted that the request to censor that line came from a Disney executive. Without confirming any names, he continued, “As soon as somebody says something, like, ‘Ryan, Bob Iger here. Would love it if you’d take that one line out. It’s really going to make our life hard over here.’ As soon as they say that, there’s just something in my brain that goes, ‘Must keep line! Precious!’ And then as soon as the fog of war lifts and you have a second thought, it’s like, ‘Of course I can take that out. Can I say something about Pinocchio instead? And the answer is yes!” He admitted he would have otherwise rebelled against such requests, but Marvel head Kevin Feige’s key advice likely resonated in him at the moment.
Ryan Reynolds Watched Deadpool & Wolverine Covert In Theaters
Earlier in the panel, Reynolds said Feige’s comment haunted the actor during the writing process. “‘Make it great’ – that’s hard,” he asserted, but that note likely inspired Deadpool & Wolverine‘s critical and box office success. Reynolds said he realized their achievement when he witnessed firsthand the palpable excitement of audiences in theaters. He said the entire endeavor was “an apex moment in my life, in terms of the experience of both making something and not just the outcome of it, the box office and stuff, but the actual experience of the movie itself. Sitting in a movie theater with an audience where I’m hiding in the back, getting to watch those moments of surprise.”
Director Shawn Levy provided more context on the joke Reynolds scrapped from the script. “We have made a pact, Ryan and I, to go to our grave with that line, but I will say that it was replaced with an equally dirty line of dialogue about Pinocchio shoving his face up Deadpool’s ass and starting to lie like crazy,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I was like, ‘Ryan, that’s your replacement line in response to, ‘Can we clean it up?’ That’s Ryan Reynolds for you, audacious to the very edge.” Reynolds’ Deadpool dropped that joke during the film’s biggest cameo reveals, and the joke was a potshot at Disney. Co-star Hugh Jackman thought the deleted line went too far when he heard it. “When I was on set, I was like, there’s no way that’s gonna be in [the movie],” he told EtalkCTV.
