Kick-Ass 2 director Jeff Wadlow reveals his original plans for Fox‘s unmade X-Force movie in 2013 and how it was set to reintroduce Deadpool.
“I was lucky enough to write an X-Force script for Fox before the original Deadpool film was made. He’d been in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and, as a comic book fan, I knew that was a travesty. That was a total abomination. I wanted to get it right,” Wadlow said in an interview on the podcast A Trip to the Movies with Alex Zane, where he discussed the time Fox had him attached to write and direct the X-Men spin-off.
“My pitch for the movie was, ‘If X-Men is about mutants that get to go to private school, what about the mutants that get to go to public school? I wrote this movie that was very much inspired by the original X-Men run back in the ’90s. I introduced Cable as this dark mentor for our characters. It was definitely about the young mutants formerly known as the New Mutants. In my movie, it was Cannonball, Boom-Boom, and I aged Domino down. Rictor was there. Feral was there. I put them on this road movie. I modeled it after Red Dawn. They were on the run in West Texas.”
Wadlow continued by revealing how he met with current Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds at the time he was developing the X-Force script. Had the actor accepted the project three years shy of his blockbuster solo movie in 2016, Marvel fans would have seen a Merc with the Mouth depicted closer to his early comic book appearances.
“I wanted this antagonist chasing them the whole time. Deadpool was introduced as a villain in the original X-Force run, so I had our main villain hire a mercenary to hire this group of ragtag villains down and the mercenary hired was Deadpool,” Wadlow said. “He was in motorcycle leathers with this red ballistic face mask. I made it very clear he was going to look just like he did in the comic books.”
Drew Goddard’s scrapped X-Force movie
Though X-Force did not see the light of day under Wadlow’s direction, Reynolds’ Deadpool found success on the big screen with his 2016 hit movie and 2018 sequel featuring Josh Brolin as Cable. The latter installment was originally planned as the launching pad for a different X-Force project under the direction of Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods). After Disney acquired the X-Men movie license upon the sale of Fox in 2019, X-Force was scrapped in favor of the MCU-set Deadpool & Wolverine.
Directed by Shawn Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine hits cinemas on July 26.
