Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series highlighting the scripts behind the year’s buzziest films today shines the spotlight on the marvel that is Deadpool & Wolverine, the superhero mashup that paired Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in the third installment of the Merc with the Mouth movie series, and marked the first Deadpool movie at Disney‘s MCU (“There was a whole boring rights issue, blahbity-blahbity-blah,” Deadpool himself says in the script’s opening pages).
Like the first two pics — 2016’s Deadpool and 2018’s Deadpool 2, both from Fox — Deadpool & Wolverine hit (and sliced and otherwise pummeled) the spot for fans who had been calling for the antihero team-up. Released at the end of July, it became the biggest R-rated opening of all time both domestically ($211 million) and worldwide ($444.1 million), eclipsing the mark set by the first Deadpool. It eventually became the year’s second highest-grossing film to date (after Inside Out 2) with $1.34 billion in global box office.
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Shawn Levy was directing Reynolds in The Adam Project (they previously teamed on Free Guy) when Reynolds asked him to helm D&W, and Jackman came aboard even though he had purportedly hung up his claws on the X-Men character with 2017’s Logan.
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Once Jackman was in, the writers went to work, with the idea of an opposites, two-hander road-trip story that harkens to the likes of Midnight Run or Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Levy and Reynolds re-recruited Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wrote the first Deadpool and teamed with Reynolds to pen the second one. Levy also co-wrote on the third installment along with Zeb Wells, who was in the Marvel Cinematic Universe stable already as creator and executive producer of the animated Disney+ series Marvel Zombies and who had written an episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
Their plot finds Wade Wilson (Reynolds) thinking his past as Deadpool is behind him until he finds himself suddenly in a fight for the survival of his homeworld and must suit up again — and convince a reluctant Wolverine to help him. Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Karan Soni and Matthew Macfadyen also starred.
“Creating a film like Deadpool with Wolverine is about epic storytelling on a large canvas and tapping into decades of character legacy,” Levy says. “These characters already have a relationship with us and the world’s culture, giving the movie a mythic scale. It’s about entertaining the audience, and also honoring the incredible history and souls of these characters.”
Click below to read the screenplay.