Kevin Feige Tells Us About Ryan Reynolds’ ‘One-Room Christmas’ Deadpool Movie Pitch
Exclusive: Ryan Reynolds had many "divergent" ideas for Deadpool 3, and one that stuck with Kevin Feige was a low-budget Christmas movie that was apparently set in "one room."
While Ryan Reynolds has gone on the record as far back as 2021 to state that his dream vision for a third Deadpool movie always involved a road trip story with Wade and Logan, the path to making Deadpool & Wolverine a reality was anything but a smooth ride. In fact, Reynolds spent a good deal of time pitching Marvel Studios on a number of alternate, divergent ideas for Deadpool 3… including a low-budget concept sans any big set pieces. And when we spoke to Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige last week, the MCU impresario confirmed that a “Sundance” version was briefly developed. He even shed some light on Reynolds’ apparently Yuletide vision.
“Ryan is an idea machine who every day could pitch a new Deadpool movie, and did for a while as we were working on this,” Feige told us. “I don’t know exactly which ones he’s revealed and talked about, but that was one of them. [It was] just a low-budget, takes place in one room, Christmas movie. His love of this character, and ability to tap into this character, knows no bounds. But we couldn’t find that core emotional backbone for quite a while until Hugh [Jackman], out of the blue, called Ryan and said, ‘I want to come back.'”
The idea of Reynolds being “an idea machine” is clearly true since the story the actor told EW mentioned a different take from the “one room Christmas movie” Feige revealed to us.
“The most divergent concept was more of a Sundance indie film,” Reynolds told EW. “Literally, it was a $5 or $6 million budget with no special effects. It was just a talkie-talkie road trip with me and Dopinder, and some of the things we collected and saw along the way. It wasn’t meant to be an event movie. If we’re on our way to Point C, it was meant to just get us to Point B. That was the weirdest one. I liked it. I thought it was kind of fun.”
Since they ultimately decided not to go down either of those roads, it begs one question: Is there room in the theatrical arena of the MCU for a low-to-moderately budgeted superhero film? Some would argue that half the reason audiences show up to these movies is for the expensive CGI spectacle, although the first Deadpool movie in 2016 ($58 million budget) was a prominent exception. Feige, a noted Star Trek fan, appreciated our example of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as a low-budget franchise film that worked.
“It depends on your definition of low or moderate, right?” Feige explained. “Iron Man cost much less than an Endgame, right? So there are varying degrees, but I do think you’re right, and Wrath of Khan‘s a great example of that. The first X-Men film is a great example of that, so is the first Iron Man film. Limitations are very helpful…”
As Feige noted in our last piece, Marvel Studios has “started self-imposing limitations for just that reason, including on Deadpool & Wolverine.” Of course, the market imposes its own limitations, especially when certain films like 2021’s Eternals or 2023’s The Marvels fail with fans and at the box office.
When franchise flicks like Solo: A Star Wars Story don’t work, the typical studio impulse is to sweep said film under the rug and forget about that set of characters. However, Ryan Reynolds didn’t give up on Deadpool after the disastrous X-Men Origins: Wolverine, nor does Feige ever forget a piece of IP since he’s even including elements from 2008’s The Incredible Hulk in next year’s Captain America: Brave New World. There was also a major story strand from black sheep MCU movie, Thor: The Dark World, dropped right into Avengers: Endgame.
“We revisited that in Endgame in a big way with Frigga,” Feige enthused while referring to Rene Russo’s character from the earliest Thor movies. “That’s part of the fun of what the comics have done for decades and decades is reinterpreting storylines, or taking obscure forgotten characters and bringing them back and re-evaluating them. Tim Blake Nelson is back in our universe for the first time in 16 years. Anything that we’ve done is part of the tapestry of the MCU, and I don’t think one should hide from that, but embrace it and—sometimes it may take 16 years [but we] find the right moment in time to bring it back.”
While we shouldn’t hold our breath for more Eternals or Marvels movies anytime soon, hopefully it won’t take “16 years” for those elements to get their redemption the same way certain characters do in Deadpool & Wolverine… much to the delight of our audience, we might add.
One character that Feige stopped thinking about for a long time was Wolverine himself, as Logan was part of the separate rights package which 20th Century Fox licensed for many years before Disney ultimately bought them out. Having begun his career as an associate producer on 2000’s X-Men, Feige referred to the unlikely reunion with Hugh Jackman as “amazing.”
“It was unanticipated, because the rights had not been with us for so long,” explained Feige. “I just had never thought about that ever happening, so now that it has happened it is particularly meaningful. It was a quarter of a century ago that we were together in Toronto… him a star of the movie, me one of the many producorial members. Now to be back together, for this movie in particular—as emotional as the movie itself is, it felt that way to us behind the scenes.”
Deadpool & Wolverine opens everywhere on Friday, July 26, exclusively in theaters.
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Max Evry has been a film journalist since 2005, serving at various times as a writer, interviewer, graphic designer, podcaster, video creator, features editor, and managing…