There’s been a notable uptick in Hollywood stories revolving around the father figure – be it Tomb Raider or A Wrinkle in Time. Hell, even Sony’s wildly successful God of War had Kratos take on dad duties in what quickly became a radical reinvention of the venerable franchise.
But it seems we won’t be adding Deadpool 2 to the list anytime soon. As Ryan Reynolds tells Entertainment Weekly, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick originally envisioned Wade Wilson as a father, only to scrap the idea before it could gain any significant traction.
Reynolds holds a writing credit for the blockbuster sequel, so it’s not all that surprising to learn that he worked in close collaboration with Reese and Wernick when deciding what’s next for the Merc With a Mouth. And despite some early brainstorming, it seems fatherhood isn’t on the cards after all.
The genesis of it was: What if Deadpool had a child? Like, what if we started five years later and what would that be like? By page 1.5, it was totally untenable. We were just like, Nope. Nope. No, no, no. This is never, ever going to work. We went back to the drawing board and kind of reworked it in a way about wanting to have a child, which is something that so many people I know experience on a daily basis – wanting to have a child but can’t.
The end result would have been a Deadpool movie that was remarkably different from the one that’s about to hit theaters, and it’s fair to say that the decision to introduce Wade Jr. would have come at the expense of Russell’s own relationship with Wade Wilson, which looks to be pretty instrumental to the story of David Leitch’s soon-to-be-released sequel.
Speaking of which, Deadpool 2 has been slated for a release on May 18th, when it’s expected to score a huge $150M in its opening weekend and become the biggest opening for an R-rated movie, well, ever.