SPUMC may be failing before our eyes, but that didn’t stop somebody else from having exactly the same idea. “Hey,” they said, “Marvel seems to be doing well with their whole Cinematic Universe… it can’t be too hard! We have all these other Marvel characters, can we just… you know. smush them together and make a thing?”
And we saw how that turned out for Madame Web. And Morbius.
Before the acquisition by Disney, 20th Century Fox was spinning up something similar to Sony’s soggy SPUMC around various characters such as Channing Tatum as Gambit, Dafne Keen’s X-23 character from Logan, and X-Force from Kick-Ass 2 director Jeff Wadlow.
On the A Trip To The Movies With Alex Zane podcast Wadlow confirmed he wrote the script and teased out some details about what his X-Force would have been about:
“I put them on this sort of road movie I modeled the movie a little bit after ‘Red Dawn’ the movie from the ’80s with Patrick Swayze.
They were doing these mutant internment camps, which was an analog to the Japanese internment camps that happened during WWII. But they’re on the run in West Texas, and that was the vibe of the film.
I wanted this antagonist chasing them the whole time and what most people know Deadpool was introduced as a villain in the original ‘X-Force’ run. I had our main villain hired, a mercenary, to hunt this ragtag group of mutants down, and the mercenary hired was Deadpool.
And I said he’s in these motorcycle leathers with a red ballistic facemask, and I made it clear he’d look just like does in the comics…and he was the ‘Merc With A Mouth.’”
He confirmed that he had written it before the first Deadpool movie was released, and he wanted Ryan Reynolds in his film:
“I think the studio after X-Men Origins: Wolverine… there was a lot of uncertainty about where the X properties were going, but through my agency, I got in touch with Ryan.
I got him the script, and he read it, and he loved it. He said, ‘It’s like this grand cameo for Deadpool’ he’s in a lot of the movie, but it’s definitely a supporting part. He’s almost like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive chasing these characters…ultimately they turn him in the end.”
None of this will be happening now, as Deadpool is about to be subsumed MCU.
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