There's nothing "Dead" about it.
The quirky, humor-filled "Deadpool"[1] racked up an astonishing $132 million over the three-day weekend, making it the biggest R-rated opening ever[2] and the biggest opener — period — in the history of 20th Century Fox.
The suits must have known a flood of cash was imminent, because a sequel has already reportedly been greenlighted with the same writing team who doled out laughs in the first, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.
So what exactly will the next film involve? Well, if you hung around long enough to catch the two post-credits sequences at the end of "Deadpool," you know that it was revealed that Cable will appear in the follow-up.
Cable was a character who, like Deadpool, first appeared in Marvel's New Mutants[3] title in the early 1990s. (Like Deadpool and many heroes from that era, his uniform was inexplicably laden with pouches. What was he keeping in there? Pennies? Dental floss?)
Cable's full history is too complicated to explain here, but all you really need to know is that he's from the future, which makes it a pretty good bet that "Deadpool 2" will involve some time-traveling shenanigans.
So who else might appear? We're betting on other members of the X-Men.
It's possible, although producer Simon Kinberg tells The Post that the filmmakers want Deadpool movies to seem an entity unto themselves, not "leaning on the X-Men movies."
Two X-Men — Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead — do appear in "Deadpool," causing the hero to joke that the studio couldn't afford any others. (That line, by the way, was improvised by the film's star, Ryan Reynolds.)
"Colossus was a character that [director] Tim [Miller] and Ryan always wanted in the movie because he's such a squeaky-clean character," Kinberg says. "He seemed like a funny juxtaposition with this criminal character [Deadpool]. We found Negasonic because we loved the name. It's the craziest name for a character."
Fans dreaming of the "Merc With a Mouth" showing up as a full-blown member of the team in a future X-Men movie may be out of luck.
"I'd love to see them in a movie together, because it would be funny. But the tones are very different," Kinberg says. "The X-Men movies are very dramatic, almost operatic. That's something that Deadpool could make fun of in a crossover movie, but we also want to be respectful of the X-Men movies."
In other words, expect the character to move forward in a series of films only tangentially linked to the X-Men universe.
Deadpool probably won't ever team up with the A-list mutants, such as Professor X and Wolverine, and chances are, audiences don't want that anyway.
We want Deadpool to make fun of — not buddy up to — those other heroes. Imagine what he could do with lame-os from X-Men history such as Adam-X[4], a laughable 1990s hero who has a soul patch and wears a backwards baseball cap.
If he does show, here's hoping Deadpool chokes him with a chimichanga.
References
- ^ quirky, humor-filled "Deadpool" (nypost.com)
- ^ the biggest R-rated opening ever (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
- ^ New Mutants (vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net)
- ^ such as Adam-X (vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net)
