After fighting for more than ten years to bring Deadpool to the big screen, Ryan Reynolds didn’t have to convince anyone at Fox that the raunchy superhero movie deserved a sequel. The movie made over $700 million despite its relatively small budget, and days after it hits theaters, Fox had already greenlit a sequel.
Although Deadpool 2 won’t take ten years to make, it has been going through some growing pains of its own, losing director Tim Miller, reportedly due to creative differences. In his place, Fox has hired John Wick director David Leitch, and Ryan Reynolds couldn’t be more excited.
“Everbody was just a fan of his work,” Reynolds told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. “He’s just a guy who’s so muscular with his action. He also really understands those Deadpool sensibilities and where we need to take the franchise from here. And I love John Wick. One of the things that David Leitch does that very few filmmakers can do these days is they can make a movie on an ultra tight minimal budget look like it was shot for 10-15 times what it cost.”
Regarding Miller’s decision to leave the sequel, Reynolds says that “there is not a human being on earth that worked harder on Deadpool than Tim. He’s an incredibly, incredibly talented director.”
As for the production of the movie itself, Reynolds says that they are “just in the development stage but we’re about to move into production.” He also told EW that the team is currently casting Cable as well as “looking at” bringing Domino (a member of the X-Force strike team) into the sequel.
EW also spoke to producer Simon Kinberg (long-time X-Men writer and producer), who talked about the need to innovate without going overboard:
“It has [to] tonally and stylistically be as fresh and original. That’s a big challenge especially because they had 10 years to gestate on the first movie and we don’t have that kind of time on the second movie. That’s the biggest mandate going into on the second film: to not make it bigger. We have to resist the temptation to make it bigger in scale and scope, which is normally what you do when you have a surprise hit movie. But actually stay true to the tenets of it’s the tone and the style and the humor that make it so special — it’s not the explosions and the special effects.”
Deadpool 2
is currently scheduled to open on January 12th, 2018.
