One of the most exciting, Easter egg-packed moments of Deadpool & Wolverine is right near the beginning. Deadpool needs to find an alternate Wolverine to restore his universe and travels across the multiverse looking for the right one. The sequence includes all sorts of cameos and winks to comic fans, but originally, it was much different and less exciting.
Last week, io9 spoke to Shane Reid, one of the editors on Deadpool & Wolverinewho shared all sorts of fascinating goodies. Case in point, Reid revealed the Wolverine montage originally only had three Wolverines in it. “There was mini Wolfie, Patch, and Cavillrine,” Reid told us via video chat. (Yes, Henry Cavill’s cameo as “The Cavillrine” was always in there.) “And the idea originally [was] he walks right into mini Wolfie and leaves, and then he’s into Cavillrine, and that’s kind of it. I think Patch was the third one. And I actually started putting that sequence together and I had a couple of different tracks on it at first and it wasn’t very appetizing. It was almost like, ‘What is this sequence?’ Like we’re not committing to seeing these Wolverines, but we’re kind of jumping into it.”
This realization happened around the time the writers’ strike, followed by the actors’ strike, shut down production. Without any writing or acting to be done, Reid, along with director Shawn Levy, star-producer Ryan Reynolds, and fellow editor Dean Zimmerman, continued editing. Which is when the two editors took the actor and his director aside. “Dean and I really went to Shawn and Ryan and went ‘Guys, there’s so much more we can do with this, but like we need at least three more variants to be able to sort of weave this story together and have this fun montage.’”
“And so Shawn and Ryan, being the amazing creative partners that they are, trusted Dean and I,” Reid continued. “We had a storyboard artist find us like 10 more Wolverines. We were like, ‘If we’re going to do it now, let’s go deep cut. Like if you’re playing one dude in the audience who knows that one insert on that comic, let’s do that.’ And we ended up finding Old Man Logan, the crucifixion with the X was just a really cool image, and the John Byrne brown and tan, which brought out the Hulk, which we were able to do. So we built that with storyboards and then Ryan would record dialogue, saying like, ‘That’s going to need coconut oil’ et cetera, and we wove that together and felt good about it. ”
Storyboards are one thing though. Then you had to make it. And, thankfully for Reid and crew, the strike also made them reassess the schedule moving ahead. “When we went back into production, we were able to get rid of a few things we were going to shoot that we felt like we didn’t need anymore because we’d exhausted the dailies,” Reid said. “And so we were able to fold that into production and not expand it, but get us three more to work with. And then you get that sequence.”
Oh, and it was Reid to added “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News to the sequence. “It was just in my playlist and it felt like a perfect fit as far as, you know, time travel and bringing something back that was just inherently nostalgic for everybody,” he said. “But also just funny and out of left field.”
Deadpool & Wolverine is now in theaters.
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