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Ryan Reynolds Reveals His Wild Original Deadpool 2 Pitch
Ryan Reynolds has revealed the Deadpool 2 story he originally pitched to Fox, and it’s even wilder than what ended up in the actual movie. After the huge success of Deadpool, which grossed $783 million at the worldwide box office, expectations were high for the 2018 sequel. Though Deadpool 2 fell somewhat short of the original’s box office take with $733 million worldwide, it still qualifies as a blockbuster in its own right.
In keeping with the tradition of the Deadpool comics and the 2016 movie, Deadpool 2 is filled with fourth-wall-breaking gags, R-rated profanity and over-the-top violence. It also gave fans their first taste of comic book character Cable, as embodied by Josh Brolin, as well as the debut of Zazie Beetz’s Domino. Plot-wise, the movie is an appropriately insane concoction built around time travel and loads of shocking character deaths.
As crazy as the plot of Deadpool 2 is, it turns out it could have been even crazier. In an appearance on The Tonight Show to promote the upcoming Blu-ray release of Deadpool 2, star Ryan Reynolds revealed the insane premise for the movie he originally pitched to Fox. According to Reynolds, his idea was for the entire story to revolve around Deadpool trying to steal the big red chair from The Voice. Unfortunately, the studio didn't care for the idea. See the video above (Reynolds recounts his pitch right around 43 seconds in).
Later in the video, Reynolds talks about the extended cut of Deadpool 2 featured on the Blu-ray release. Dubbed “The Super-Duper Cut,” the extended version features 15 minutes of unseen footage as well as a ridiculous four new post-credit scenes, including two involving Wade Wilson going back in time to kill baby Hitler. Reynolds also talks about Deadpool 2’s most hilarious cameo, in which Brad Pitt makes an almost non-existent appearance as The Vanisher.
Though Deadpool 2 was by any measure a success for Fox, it’s also true that the movie failed to surpass the box office take of the original. Arguably, the plot of Deadpool 2 was too convoluted and too reliant on standard superhero tropes (even if it made fun of those tropes). So, would Deadpool 2 have actually done better with a story more along the lines of the one Ryan Reynolds says he pitched? Though the thought of Deadpool spending the whole movie trying to steal a chair from a reality competition show sounds ridiculous on the face of it, that idea does have the virtue of being relatively simple and straight-forward. Reynolds’ instinct to pare things down to something very basic may have actually been sound, and the movie arguably would have been better off going that route.
On the other hand, Fox may have had a good point in rejecting Reynolds’ pitch. Though audiences seem willing to follow Deadpool almost anywhere, the red chair idea may have been a shade too bizarre even for them. As it is, Deadpool 2 continued the success of the franchise and set things up for future X-Force movies. Perhaps Reynolds’ red chair idea will get into a movie at some point down the road.
