The Merc with a Mouth and the Ragin’ Cajun could be the next Deadpool & Wolverine. The R-rated team-up movie — which brought Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine from the Fox X-Men movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe under Disney-owned Marvel Studios — is so far the second highest-grossing movie of the year with $1.3 billion worldwide. Marvel has yet to officially announce a potential Deadpool 4, or when or where Deadpool might next appear in the MCU (why is Thor crying?!), but Reynolds sees a more secondary role in Deadpool’s future.
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“I see Deadpool as a supporting character much more than he is a main [character], the center,” Reynolds told Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield on Variety‘s Actors on Actors session. “We center him sometimes because that’s what they want, but you can’t center him unless you take everything away from him. You have to create a situation where he’s so much the underdog, and I don’t think I can do that again.”
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Deadpool & Wolverine picked up six years after Wade Wilson’s time-travel misadventures in 2018’s Deadpool 2. After popping over to Earth-616 — only to be rejected for Avengers membership — Wade returned to his native Earth-10005, where he had retired as a hero and was working as a toupee-clad car salesman. He split from his former fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and then embarked on a journey of self-worth and discovery alongside the “worst” Wolverine from an alternate timeline to save his home universe from being deleted by Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) and the Time Variance Authority.
“I think if he comes back, it’s gonna be in someone else’s movie,” Reynolds continued, suggesting a supporting role in a Channing Tatum-fronted Gambit movie. “Channing was so excited to play Gambit, and I would happily be the fifth banana in his movie, or anyone else’s.”
After Deadpool and Wolverine are pruned by the TVA, they end up in the Void: described as a “metaphysical junkyard” for franchise castoffs like the Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes), X-23 (Dafne Keen), and the X-Man Gambit.
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Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy is one of many filmmakers who was once attached to make Tatum’s solo Gambit movie at Fox, but the X-Men spinoff failed to materialize before Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019.
“I love how you did this in Spider-Man: No Way Home: You’re weaving DNA strands of a cultural conversation along with the narrative of the movie,” Reynolds told Garfield, who reprised his role for the first time since 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. “You guys did it in such a way that I burst into tears. One of the best feelings I’ve ever had is sitting in Hall H at Comic-Con and watching Wesley Snipes cross the frame and people are crying. They realize in an instant that they desperately missed this person, but they didn’t know they missed him.”
Reynolds and Jackman have given vague responses when asked about their potential return in ensemble movies Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, which will mark the end of the Multiverse Saga in 2027.
“I don’t know,” Reynolds said about the future of the Deadpool franchise. “Honestly, my feeling is that the character works very well in two ways. One is scarcity and surprise. So it had been six years since the last one, and part of the reason is that it swallows my whole life. I have four kids, and I don’t ever want to be an absentee [dad]. I kind of die inside when I see their faces and they do a sports thing or something and I missed it.”
“I don’t know what the future of Deadpool will be, but I do know that we made the movie to be a complete experience instead of a commercial for another one,” Reynolds added.
Reynolds, who also co-wrote and produced the movie, released a hidden scene from the post-credits sequence (now zoomed in) confirming that Tatum’s Gambit survived the Void encounter with the reality-consuming Alioth.
“I honestly don’t know what goes on behind closed doors in the bookkeeping sessions at Marvel, but I do know that they’re obsessed with [Tatum] in that role,” Reynolds previously told EW about a potential Gambit spinoff. “It’s kind of like the same situation I went through [with the first Deadpool]. Once you show that it works well, that’s really what they need. Sometimes they just need to see it in action.”
Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine is now available to stream at home.
