Deadpool 2 has one of the best post-credits sequences of any Marvel movie, as it filters in several hilarious skits throughout. Using Cable’s repaired time-spinner, the Merc with a Mouth goes back in time and saves a few of the friends and loved ones he’d lost during the film. Once he’s done that, he decides to clear up some crimes against comic book cinema that he’d committed in the past, including X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Green Lantern.
It’s arguably the Origins scene that packs the most punch, as it cleverly splices Wade Wilson into the finale of that oft-derided X-Men prequel, allowing him to murder the terrible version of the character from the film and even kind of interact with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, albeit via archival footage.
You’d think that this scene must have been easy to create, as it mostly consists of footage sitting in Fox’s vault. However, Ryan Reynolds revealed to the Empire Film Podcast that it actually proved a pain to do. Due to some complications with getting hold of the raw form of the scene in question, Reynolds and the Deadpool 2 team had to go on a wild goose chase.
It got so stressful, in fact, that the actor thought they might have to try and coax Hugh Jackman back to recreate the sequence. Here’s how he explained it:
“We had a dick of a time trying to get the actual raw footage though from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The movie was shot on film, it wasn’t shot on digital so it was harder to get. We were sitting there on the Fox lot, the exact piece of the movie we need had been damaged on whatever the transfer was, so we had to go to some backup which was in some vault somewhere in the middle of the country, the United States, and we ended up finally, at the last second inputting it into the movie.
For me, I was literally losing sleep over it though, I was thinking ‘oh my god, how are we going to do this, am I going to have to call Hugh and ask him to shoot this chunk that looks exactly like a movie he’s already done?’ I can’t think of a worse hell for a human being to do.”
Reynolds went on to clarify that it was only Wolverine’s part in the scene that they struggled to locate, so if they were forced to recreate the Origins moment, it would only have needed Jackman to come back and repeat a very brief line.
“Ironically, my side was fine. His side, the one shot we needed of him going, you know, ‘Wade?’ as he’s looking at the bizarre Baraka-pool thing, we just didn’t have.”
Thankfully, it didn’t come to that in the end. Though it would have been awesome to have Jackman film some new footage as Wolverine for a Deadpool movie, the star has seemingly ruled out the idea of returning to his most famous role for good. As such, Deadpool 2 might have been left without one of its best moments if that elusive footage hadn’t been found.