The Ringer-Verse - Marvel’s New Dynamic Duo: Deadpool and Wolverine

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

In the aftermath of the Infinity Saga, Marvel Studios is at an inflection point, and it has chosen an unlikely pair of heroes to lead the MCU forward: Deadpool and Wolverine. In this special audio feature, Ringer staff writer Daniel Chin explores the cinematic histories of the two iconic characters ahead of their team-up in 'Deadpool & Wolverine.' Interviews with Shawn Levy, Simon Kinberg, and more help tell the story of how the summer blockbuster became Marvel’s big bet on the studio’s future. Host: Daniel Chin Producers: Bobby Wagner and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Bobby Wagner Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Bill Simmons. I am thrilled to announce our newest YouTube channel. It's called Ringer Movies. If you're a fan of our movie coverage here at The Ringer, then you're in luck. Because every episode of The Rewatchables and The Big Picture, now on YouTube. Like Bill said, Ringer movies will feature full episodes of my show, The Big Picture, the Rewatchables, as well as special live episodes, deep dives into movie history, and a bunch of other fun stuff featuring other movie-loving Ringer personalities.

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Then you'd want a cargo liner. Or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those WeatherTech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need WeatherTech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. Eight years ago, Marvel's one and only Deadpool, the Merck with a mouth, got his very own movie. And less than 10 minutes into the film?

Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my very own movie? I can't tell you, but it does rhyme with Polvereen. He already had Wolverine, let's say, on his mind. From the inception of the Deadpool franchise, the character Deadpool has been tied to the famous adamantium club member of the X-Men. Deadpool 2, at least in 2018, even doubled down in a bit. The movie opens with a music box, portraying Wolverine's death in the previous year's Logan, along with some choice words from Deadpool about Hugh Jackman's fallen hero. Fuck, Wolverine!

First, he rides my coattails with the R rating. Then the hairy motherfucker ups the ante by dying. What a dick! Well, guess what, Wolby? I'm dying in this one too. But Wolverine is more than just a reoccurring punchline. He's long been on Ryan Reynolds' wishlist of Deadpool team-up candidates. Yet with the Deadpool franchise launching 16 years into Jackman's career as the X-Man,

and just one year before the Australian actor's supposed superhero retirement, a crossover seemed unlikely. But a lot has changed in the past few years. And later this month, Jackman and Reynolds leave 20th century Fox behind to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Deadpool and Wolverine. director Sean Levy is now at the helm of a movie that Marvel fans have been dreaming of for years. We know what the legacy of these Marvel characters and movies

means to people because that's what it means to us. And so we not only made sure to honor that legacy in how we protect and caretake these characters, but in fact, the acknowledgement of that legacy is itself part of the legacy. is itself part of the story. So it's not just part of how we made the movie, it's part of the story we tell.

And that means those roots run deep. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Into the ringerverse. Welcome into the ringerverse. Welcome into the ringerverse. Welcome into the ringerverse. Welcome into the ring ofverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. My name is Daniel Chin, I'm your host for this special audio feature. As a staff writer at The Ringer, my main beat is fandom, so I've written a lot about Marvel. But lately, there have been few releases to cover.

Last November, Marvel delayed two movies into 2025, which left just one new film scheduled to arrive in theaters this year, Deadpool and Wolverine. The last time Marvel released a single movie in the calendar year was a dozen years ago in 2012. And that movie was The Avengers, the blockbuster crossover event that opened the floodgates for the MCU.

Over the next seven years, Marvel became the most dominant franchise in cinema history, and arguably the primary engine of Hollywood. But things have changed since Avengers Endgame. The follow-up multiverse saga, which began in 2021, has seen 10 movies, nine live-action TV shows, and two animated series, released in just three and a half years. While the output has been prolific, the results have been mixed at best. The highs of the Infinity Saga feel like distant memories. What we're seeing over and over again, both with Marvel and with other franchises, is audiences are rejecting more of the same.

As a production company, it was harder and harder to keep quality control over those various projects, to make them feel like they were naturally interweaving with each other. Deadpool Wolverine is about to hit at a really vulnerable time for Marvel Studios. They are sort of licking their wounds. During the Multiverse saga, audiences have progressively lost interest in the studios. onslaught of movies and TV shows. 2023's The Marvels became the lowest-grossing movie in the history of the MCU, and one of the few films not to break even.

On the Disney Plus side, reports surfaced late last year that Marvel would be overhauling its approach to TV. The studio had more or less tried to apply its movie formula to the small screen, ignoring the traditional TV-making model in the process, like having a series showrunner. After Flops Like Secret Invasion, which premiered in 2023 and became Marvel's worst-reviewed series to date, The studio has learned those traditions exist for a reason. Which brings us to 2024. Desperate Times call for desperate measures.

Hugh Jackman is stepping out of superhero retirement to break out Wolverine's Clause one last time. Deadpool and Wolverine is the first R-rated movie to come out of Marvel Studios ever. How did we get to this point? How, out of all the superheroes in the MCU, has Marvel chosen an anti-hero like Deadpool as its savior? Your little cinematic universe is about to change forever. Here at the Ringiverse, we do deep dives all the time, but we're going to do things a little differently for this audio feature. Over the past few months, I've spoken to a number of creatives

who worked on X-Men, Wolverine, and DePo-related productions to examine how those film franchises evolved. I also called up a few entertainment journalists to help provide the wider context surrounding Marvel's creative trajectory and its new focus on characters that were once exclusive to 20th century. I've been trying to figure out how Marvel got here, and whether betting on Deadpool and Wolverine is the easiest choice it's ever made, or a Hail Mary move from a desperate studio. To answer that question, you have to make like Logan and travel back in time.

We didn't know any better. We will now. Long before the stars aligned in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before Deadpool flipped the superhero film genre on its head. and even before Toby McGuire suited up as Spider-Man for the first time, there was X-Men. These days, if you mention X-Men to the typical content consumer, their first thought will probably be about the movies. But of course, X-Men started as a mega-popular comic, and in the 90s, X-Men made the leap to the screen

and entered mainstream consciousness through a TV show, X-Men the animated series. Marvel was in a much different place in the 80s and 90s. The company went through multiple ownership changes, a messy legal battle and Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 1984, former Hannah Barbaria exec, Margaret Lesh, became the president and CEO of Marvel Productions. And for six years, she and Marvel Comics legend, Stan Lee, went around Hollywood pitching TV shows and movies based on Marvel properties.

Much like Lee, Lesh was a true believer in these characters, particularly The X-Men, who had starred in Marvel's top-selling title in recent years. She thought the X-Men would be a hit with kids on the Saturday morning cartoon circuit, but no one would bite. Throughout the 80s, nobody,

none of the three big networks wanted it. That's Eric Lee-Walt, showrunner of X-Men, the animated series. They pitch and they'd pitch and they'd say, no, we'll take your Muppet babies

or we'll take your Transformers, but sorry, nope, there's just not a big enough audience for Marvel superheroes is not going to work. They're too adult, they're two this and to that. We hate it.

Stop bothering us with it. Lesch couldn't find a taker until she left Marvel and became the head of Fox Kids. And even then, she had to stake her job on the animated X-Men series success to get it made. But her gamble paid off. When X-Men the Animated Series finally aired in October 1992, with its epic theme song blasting out of television sets across the country,

it became an instant hit. Nielsen ratings came out and quickly established that X-Men was dominating in the Saturday morning, Kibbs block. That's Julia Lee-Walt, staff writer on X-Men. The Animated Series and Eric's wife. They met while working at Disney TV animation in the late 80s. Well, that's great news. And then you got an order for 13 more episodes for season two.

And then, so it was all piecemeal? Yeah, it was peaceful because, I mean, after we finished writing the first 13, the artist finished drawing the first 13 storyboards, we were all let go because they did, they're in the particular faith that there's going to be a second season or that this would catch on. And then four months later when it premiered,

because it took so long to hand animate, to hand paint, that suddenly realized, oh, my God, we've got a number one hit on our hands. We've got to hire all these people back. And about two-thirds of us were able to come back because we were working on other stuff, but we were able to break from it. The Lee Walds, director Larry Houston, and the rest of their staff faced all sorts of challenges over the show's 76-episode run. But X-Men, the Animated series, pushed the boundaries

of what was possible in a children's TV program, integrating adult themes and concepts into the X-Men's adventures. The show adapted storylines from Chris Claremont and John Byrne's iconic comic book run, building on their popularity while breaking ground in a new medium. And its success did not go unnoticed by the company's top

brass. The people running Marvel at the time, Ike Promoter and Avi Arad really took an interest in X-Men the animated series, and they come from a toy background. Now, if you listen to the Ringerverse, that's probably a voice that needs no introduction,

but I'll do it anyway for the uninitiated. That's The Ringer's Joanna Robinson, co-host of House of R and co-author of MCU, The Rain of Marvel Studios. And so the X-Men animated series, a show that I loved and grew up on, was essentially a toy commercial for action figures. And storylines were crafted around which toys they could manufacture and move. But it worked like gangbusters. It was hugely successful for them. And so then they saw this opportunity of, like, the word we like to use is toyetic, this idea of like, how can. we take this floundering comp a company that we, you know, just barely clawing our way out of bankruptcy.

What are other revenue streams for us? In 1996, Marvel entered bankruptcy. I'll spare you the details, but this low point was a critical chapter in the company's history. The bankruptcy started a battle for control of the company. When the legal dust settled a couple years later, Marvel had a new owner, a toy manufacturer called Toy Biz. And its owner, like ProMutter, named Avi Arad as Marvel's story. chief creative officer and CEO of Marvel Studios. Earlier in his career, Farad had been a star toy designer at Toy Biz.

He had also been an executive producer on X-Men the Animated series and the CEO of Marvel films before the bankruptcy. As Marvel shifted toward a strategy of optimizing toy sales, Arad was the one who really started to move the company deeper into film and TV. Here's Dave Gonzalez, co-host of Ringer podcast, Trial by Content, and co-author of MCU, The Rain of Marvel Studios. Aviarad was very much in the idea of we could package these movies and sell them to Hollywood and Hollywood will finance the movies and we'll just get to sort of make money off the licenses.

X-Men the Animated Series had already provided a proof of concept. The success with that not only was selling lots of toys but got Fox to attempt to experiment with showing a couple episodes of the animated series in primetime and it was able to draw an adult audience and ultimately was those tests with the animated series that brought 20th century Fox to the table with Avi Arad to be like maybe we could make this a movie. As with the animated series, getting a live-action X-Men movie made wasn't easy.

Producer Lauren Shuler-Doner helped Fox acquire the rights to the characters in 1994, and a few years later, the studio locked in director Brian Singer. But the script languished as a carousel of writers hopped on and off the project, with some of the biggest names in Hollywood taking passes at it. and Fox held firm on the budget. Fox was very concerned about the idea of producing a comic book movie that was not Batman or Superman or Spider-Man. Those were considered the three viable global hit opportunities. That's David Hater.

He ended up as the sole credited screenwriter on X-Men and later served as a co-writer on its sequel, X2. He says Fox's hesitation stemmed, at least in part, from the conference. complexity of the larger X-Men story. They were very, very concerned that we had 11 superpowered main characters. They all have different names. They all have different powers. It's not as simple as saying, oh, our lead character was bitten by a radioactive spider and now he has spider powers.

That's very easy for an audience to get. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen headlined the cast as Professor Xavier and Magneto, respectively, with the film centering on Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. Xavier's team featured a slightly smaller version of the one that appeared in the animated series, including Cyclops, Gene Gray, Storm, Rogue, and Wolverine, in addition to Magneto and his Acolytes. And while it was a challenge to split screen time among all of these characters, this setup also provided a chance to break from superhero movie conventions. With characters as complex and interesting as the X-Men, what it gives you is the opportunity to introduce each of them in very cool ways, to bring them in, and showcase their individual powers,

their individual abilities. So you get things like the opening in Auschwitz with Magneto and just this incredibly powerful scene that was actually written by Chris McCory where Magneto's power awakens as his parents are taken away from him in a concentration camp. It's in one of these isolated character introductions that we meet Wolverine for the first time.

A young, shirtless Hugh Jackman beats the hell out of some random guy in a cage match. leading to a confrontation with him at the bar soon after. No man takes a beating like that without a mark to show for it. Come on, buddy, this isn't going to be worth it. I know what you are. You lost you money, you keep this help, you lose something else. Jackman made his Hollywood debut as Wolverine, and was the breakout star of the movie.

His charismatic performance perfectly encapsulated the beloved character's gruff, tough guy persona, with a heart of gold buried beneath it. It didn't even matter that the actor was 6'3 in Australian, instead of 5'3 in Canadian, comic book accuracy be damned. Considering how much Jackman's celebrity has grown in the year since then, and how inseparable he's become from the character, it's easy to forget how he almost didn't get the part in the first place. Cinema history is littered with casting what-ifs,

and the role of Wolverine is a big one, because Jackman was far from the first choice. Oscar winner Russell Crow famously turned down the part, as Edvigo Mortensen, who went on to star as Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Eventually, Scottish actor of Dugray Scott landed the role. Scott's star was on the rise. He had appeared in the period drama ever after in 1998, opposite Drew Barrymore, and he was already set to fight Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible 2.

Then Fox president, Tom Rothman, was intent on Scott playing the role of Wolverine, even if the actor would still be shooting the Mission Impossible sequel when X-Men would need to start filming. But what began as a simple scheduling conflict soon became much more complicated. David Hater again. Tragically, Dugray had been in a motorcycle accident shooting the climax of Mission Impossible 2, and he'd been injured, and he was, he was like down to 150 pounds, and, you know, it just wasn't going to work. And so we were in a bit of a panic because we had already started shooting the movie,

and Wolverines in almost all of it. So we were running out of stuff to shoot. And it was Lauren Shuler-Donnair who said, you know, let's look at Hugh Jackman again. Jackman was flown out from London, where he was performing Oklahoma on stage in the West End and brought to Toronto for his audition. He did a pair of reeds, one with Anna Pacquin, and the other with Fonka Jansen.

After the second read, Jackman got the part. That was the moment that Hugh became Wolverine, and we were all grateful for it. Ahead of X-Men's release in July 2000, Studio's X around Hollywood predicted a $35 million opening weekend at best. The movie ended up earning 50,000, $54 million, which was the sixth best opening in box office history at the time, before making $296 million worldwide. As Hader sees it, one of the reasons X-Men landed so well with audiences was the film's novel approach of infusing a certain degree of realism and humanity into the superhero genre, separating it from the campier tone of successful predecessors like Tim Burton's Batman movies.

It brought in themes that were deeper than had been explored before. We discussed Nazi Germany. It was all about bigotry and racism. And X-Men has a very real profound philosophy behind it. And that really changed things. For example, Rogue has a power that prevents her from ever making physical contact with anyone in her entire life. It's so tragic that we introduced the idea that powers can be a curse. and that just gave it a whole different dynamic.

So I think it all comes down to the fact that what we were trying to do was make a great real movie first and a comic book movie as an ancillary side effect. Back in Marvel, the movie was a huge win for Avi Arad, just as he was working to get Marvel Studios more involved with Hollywood. The original X-Men marked the beginning of what would be an enduring, lucrative franchise, as well as the fact that, that Marvel Studios would be built on. There was one glaring flaw in that foundation that complicates its legacy. The behavior of Brian Singer. The filmmaker has been named in lawsuits

and accounts of sexual abuse and misconduct, dating back to before the release of the first X-Men movie. Singer's demeanor was reportedly erratic on the set of X-Men, with people who worked on the film describing his drug use and tantrums. He was said to have offered auditions and roles to young men, including minors in exchange for sex. And a number of sources told the Hollywood Reporter in 2020, that the blockbuster success of the movie only emboldened him.

One anonymous executive who was involved in the first X-Men film said, quote, we accommodated him on the first movie, and therefore we can accommodate him on the second movie, and on, and it created a monster. It wasn't until 2017, during the reckoning of the Me Too movement, that all the accounts of his alleged misconduct started to catch up to him. In an expose published by The Atlantic in 2019, four men said that they were sexually assaulted by Singer while they were underage. The director has denied all accounts of abuse or misconduct throughout the years,

and he referred to this Atlantic story as a, quote, homophobic smearpiece. His lawyer told the publication that Singer, quote, categorically denies ever having sex with or preference for underage men. Singer, who worked on five X-Men movies in total, is inseparable from the franchise's rise, and that's something that fans of the original film and its successors will always have to grapple with. The first X-Men movie didn't just establish the beloved Marvel Mutants, on the big screen. It also served as something of an origin story for the man who would become

the architect of the MCU, Kevin Feigy. Here's Joanna Robinson again. Brian Singer's original X-Men film was this moment, and it is forever going to be in the halls of history of Marvel Studios, because Lauren Schuller-Doner, who was the person controlling the rights of the X-Men, someone who worked in her office was Kevin Feiky. And he was just like an assistant. He was just like fetching coffees and walking dogs and washing cars. That's what he was doing. But he was also sort of

like her ambassador on set and he became the guy who did the main sort of connection between Lauren Schuller Donner and Fox Studios and Avi Arad from Marvel. Feige didn't have any formal power, but he made himself

indispensable. Kevin who wasn't even like a comic guy at the time, took it upon himself to study the comic books, certainly starting with the X-Men, but all through Marvel Comics. And so then he eventually became someone that Avi Red could not imagine doing Marvel Studios without. The timing was right for Fige's Rise. Two years after the success of X-Men in 2000, Sony Spider-Man raked an $821 million globally. The great superhero movie boom had begun. The sequel to X-Men came out in 2003 and didn't exactly put up spidey numbers, but it still earned $407 million worldwide as Fox's X-Men franchise

continued to grow. Starting with its iconic opening scene, in which Nightcrawler teleports through the halls of the White House, X2 was a strong follow-up that expanded the franchise's cast of mutants. It also introduced more human antagonists as the evolutionary war between mutants and humans raged on. The film featured Brian Cox as William Stryker and explored Wolverine's mysterious Weapon X origins for the first time. I just have failed experiment. Ah! If you really knew about your past, what kind of person you were?

The work we did together. People don't change, will brain. You're an animal then. You're an animal now. I just gave you claws. In 2006, the original X-Men trilogy concluded with The Last Stand, which took the crown as the highest-grossing film in the series at $460 million. world wide. The sequel continued a trend from X2, as it introduced even more mutant characters, flexing the depth of the X-Men's roster of talent. Beasts, Angel, Shadowcat, even the juggernaut,

but with the growing number of mutants, several major character deaths, and Gene Gray coming back from the dead just so she could die again. There was a lot going on in this movie. A bit too overstuffed with the grand finale of the trilogy, the last stand wasn't as well received by critics as the previous two films. However, much like the Phoenix herself, the X-Men franchise would rise again with X-Men first class in 2011. After the last stand, Fox's contract options on its original cast members had run out. That meant that for the likes of Hallie Berry, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Hugh Jackman, their time as X-Men was coming to an end, although Jackman had already started appearing in his own spin-off movies by 2009 with X-Men Origins Wolverine. For Fox, this was an opportunity to start

the cycle of X-Men stories over again. They were trying to figure out how to essentially reboot the X-Men franchise. This is Simon Kinberg. He joined the X-Men franchise as a co-writer on The Last Stand, before returning as a producer on First Class. Along with Lauren Shuler-Donner,

Kinberg would become one of the most influential figures in Fox's X-Men universe, producing, writing, or even directing almost every film thereafter. We had talked about this idea of doing the young Xavier and young Magneto movie.

Somewhat inspired, I would say, by JJ's Star Trek movie where he did young Kirk and Spock and we thought that was really effective and we thought we could do something similar with these characters. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, first-class star James McAvoy as the young Charles Xavier and Michael Fastbender as the young Magneto.

The film also notably featured Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique in what was the actress's biggest role to date. Jackman might not have been a part of the main cast this time around, but he did make it pretty much appearance in the movie. Excuse me, I'm Eric Lenshire. Tells Xavier. Don't fuck yourself.

Finding a new Wolverine to replace Jackman was always going to be a challenge. One that was complicated by the fact that Jackman was still starring in spin-off movies. We definitely never talked about having a new Wolverine in first class. And then, as we were trying to figure out what the movie after first class was going to be, there were lots of different directions based in the comics that we considered. Truly, I don't remember us ever having a conversation about how, how we were going to introduce a new Wolverine because we didn't think we would do it

in the directly next movie. And then pretty quickly, we had the idea of doing Days of Future Past. Days of Future Past, a comic from the All-Star X-Men team of Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin. Spanned two issues in 1981 and was a big part of the X-Men's rise in popularity in the 80s and 90s.

The story alternates between a 1980 present and a 2013 future timeline. Future Kitty Pride's mind is transported back in time to help the X-Men prevent an incident that would usher in a dystopian age for mutants. The Days of Future Past adaptation, which was released in May 2014, remains one of the best and most influential X-Men movies.

As much as we, the filmmakers, would love to take credit for the concept, it existed in the comic book and is one of the most famous and illustrious runs of the X-Men comics, but I do think it was one of the first, or maybe the first, of the comic adaptation, superhero movies,

that played with different times timelines and essentially creating multiverse. Directed by Brian Singer, with a screenplay written by Kinberg, Days of Future Past arrived five years before a vendor's endgame and its reality-bending time heist. It was effectively a multiverse movie. Remember, this was eight years before Marvel Studios would announce the Multiverse saga. Long before the three live-action Spider-Man would unite on screen and Spider-Man No Way Home, Days of Future Past brought the original X-Men actors back to join the cast of the

the new film series. And at its center was Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. I had the idea of making Wolverine instead of Kitty Pride, the protagonist of the movie that goes back in time. Wolverine, both because obviously he was the most popular character in the movies, but also because it felt like there was an organically interesting story to be told about Wolverine going back to the Xavier, who was sort of his mentor and becoming the mentor a teacher to a young Xavier with Xavier's own lessons. I also thought the idea of his healing power made it more believable to me that they'd be

able to send him back in time, the fact that we wouldn't have to recast a younger version because he's the same age, however many years ago, as he would have been in the future. So there were a lot of really natural reasons for having Wolverine be the main character, essentially. The film earned $746 million worldwide. the highest-grossing X-Men movie Fox would ever make. It even got an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, a first for the X-Men franchise.

Days of Future Past would be the last time that we would see the vast majority of the original X-Men cast on screen in their roles as mutants. The last pair of Fox's mainline X-Men movies, X-Men Apocalypse, and Dark Phoenix wouldn't reach the same critical or commercial heights as Days of Future Pass. The franchise's cast of Mutants continued to fill out

with younger actors taking on the roles that have been central to the original trilogy, such as Game of Thrones Sophie Turner as the new Gene Gray. Jackman's Wolverine was the one prominent X-Men character who would never be replaced in the new series of films. Maybe if we'd made a few more of the younger cast X-Men movies, maybe we would have talked about a new Wolverine. But the thing is, it would have been strange, I think,

because you do run into the question of like at what point does Wolverine just become the age of Hugh Jackman? He does stop aging at a certain point. And so that was always a bit of a sort of a conundrum for us of how to crack that. Even beyond the tricky logistics around recasting a younger version of a character who hardly ages, the real question on most fans' minds was, who could possibly replace Hugh Jackman as Wolverine? Jackman was brought back to do a cameo in 2016's X-Men Apocalypse,

but he still had what he thought would be his. last Wolverine performance. Logan. Like its predecessor, the Wolverine, 2017's Logan, United director James Mangold, and screenwriter Scott Frank, this time giving them the freedom of an R rating. From its inception, this was going to be unlike any other superhero movie, let alone X-Men or Wolverine movie that had come before it. Mangold had real clarity about the kind of movie he wanted to make. He's somebody who had made westerns and loves westerns and saw the potential for what we all thought was going to be the last Wolverine movie, and Hugh also, Hugh Jackman also thought would be the last Wolverine movie, that it would end with the sort of

illegiaic qualities of our favorite westerns, and specifically Shane, the movie Shane became kind of a North Star as we were developing the film. Shane is a classic Western that was directed by Oscar winner George Stevens in 1953. The film follows an ex-gunslinger who's trying to find a quiet life on a homestead in Wyoming for a conflict forces him back into the life of violence he had hoped to leave behind. Mangold, Scott Frank, producers Kinberg and Hutch Parker, and Jackman himself, gathered together in New York City to discuss inspirations like Shane and figure out what they would do with Jackman's last turn as Wolverine.

We had a hotel room where it was just like our brainstorm, creative, almost like writers' room of that group of people. And we were there for weeks talking through the themes, the tone, what we wanted to achieve, the characters. The result was one of the most critically acclaimed superhero movies ever made. As a loose adaptation of Mark Miller and Steve McNivins revered Old Man Logan series from 2008, Logan received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards, a first for superhero movies. The film follows an older version of Wolverine, as his healing factor fails him, and he struggles

at times to even use his claws. He's no longer a hero, and he's the last living member of the X-Men, other than Charles Xavier, who's played again by Patrick Stewart. Xavier suffers from dementia, which gives him destructive telepathic seizures. And Wolverine spends his days taking odd jobs to pay for Xavier's medications and save enough money to purchase a boat for them

to retire on together. Logan is dark, somber, and brutal. But it's also a beautiful, grounded take on the superhero genre that shows Wolverine finding new purpose in the form of a pseudo-daughter Laura. Played by Daphne Keene, Laura is a runaway mutant who is created in a lab through the use of Logan's DNA.

Laura, whose lab name is X-23, gives Wolverine a new sense of hope in a story that ends with him sacrificing himself for the next generation of mutants. In so many ways, the film provided a sense of closure to the original X-Men franchise and to its greatest star.

You don't have to fight anymore. The X-Men movie is much like the comics are operatic. They're larger than life, and in some ways they're soapy. And all of those are positive words for me, you know, and that's true for the original cartoons. It's true for the animated show now. And it's true for all of our movies. And I think the instinct and ambition for Logan was to move away from that more operatic hyper-real storytelling into something really real and granular and deeply emotional and stripped down to its sort of barest, most essential emotional elements.

And I think as a goodbye to Patrick Stewart's Xavier, as a goodbye to what we thought would be a goodbye to Hughes Wolverine, that way of stripping it down to its really base human elements gave audiences a way to connect with and say goodbye in the most intimate way. Logan was the perfect send-off for Hugh Jackman and the signature role he had played for 17 years. After nearly missing out on the part at the turn of the century, Jackman appeared as Wolverine in nine films, including cameos. That's a lot of steam chicken for one man to consume in order to maintain that peak Wolverine shape for the camera. In superhero retirement, Jackman could at long last enjoy the end of his 40s,

star in more Broadway musicals, and even eat a few carbs every now and then. To promote Logan in 2017, Jackman went on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where he was presented with exactly that last bit, a massive bowl of pasta. Just listen to how thrilled he sounded. That is right.

That's a freaking thing I've ever seen in my life. What's up, brother? Jackman got to enjoy some of that pasta on late-night TV, but his superhero retirement wouldn't last long, thanks to the emergence of a certain foul-mouthed anti-hero, Deadpool. That's after a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business, Fast,

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The story of how Deadpool became part of the MCU starts with a mistake. Remember X-Men Origins Wolverine? I glossed over it earlier, because as you might recall, the movie just wasn't very good. Although the 2009 film made more than $373 million worldwide, it fell short with critics and audiences alike. One person who wasn't all that happy with the final product was Ryan Reynolds, who just so happened to make his debut as Wade Wilson in the film, seven years before Deadpool was released. Here's Reynolds discussing his appearance in X-Men Origins with Entertainment Weekly's Jess Kagle back in 2016. They only asked if I would do this as a came in and I just did the time I had a lot.

And then I was actually on shooting the proposal at the same time. So I couldn't go back and forth. And then I remember telling one of the studio, I said, you guys are going to, people are going to go nuts over this. And he was like, I know, right? And I was like, no, not in a good way. No, nuts. No, no. People went insane.

The Deadpool character, you can't do this. In X-Men Origins Wolverine, Wade Wilson is introduced as a wisecracking mercenary and member of Team X. Early in the film, he comes in to make a few jokes, twirl a pair of katanas to deflect some bullets, and then he's pretty much sidelined until the end of the movie. Wilson re-emerges for the climactic fight scene against Wolverine, except he appears as some sort of zomified version of Deadpool. After a series of experiments and modifications,

he's become a new living weapon. He has retractable swords in his arms, he can teleport, he can even shoot laser beams out of his eyes like Cyclops. And, most memorably, the murk with a mouth has had his mouth sewn, Shut. Wait, is that you? You figured out how to shut you up.

Years later, in the mid-credit scene of Deadpool 2, Deadpool would travel back in time to clean up his previous mistakes. And so, naturally, he arrives at this very moment in X-Men Origins and shoots his ill-conceived doppelganger in the head. Everyone could get a good laugh out of the moment in 2018, but as Reynolds said, fans weren't too pleased with its initial portrayal of the character in 2009. Reynolds had been trying to develop a Deadpool film for half a decade by that point. After the character's botched introduction, Reynolds and Fox approached writers Paul Wernick

and Rhett Reese to commission a script. They wrote it the next year, but progress on Foxes is then stalled for a number of reasons. The time the X-Men universe was not spinning off characters. Kinberg again. They had Wolverine, but Wolverine was the flagship character, so that was a lot easier to create a Wolverine movie. I mean, Deadpool, he was a minor player in a Wolverine movie. the notion of creating a whole movie around somebody who I think the studio saw as a secondary or a sort of second-tier character felt really radical. But Deadpool hadn't always been a background character in the X-Men universe. Created by Rob Leifeldt and Fabian Nassieza,

Deadpool made his comic book debut in 1991 as a villain and new mutants. The characters launched coincided with a comic book boom, and he quickly grew in popularity with the rise of the X-4 series in the character cable. who was also created by Leifeld around the same time. Deadpool featured in a pair of miniseries in 1993 and 1994, got his own solo title in 1997, and gained a cult following by the end of the decade. But Deadpool was still the relative newcomer compared to X-Men stalwarts.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the original X-Men in 1963, and Wolverine, created by Len Ween and John Romita Sr., made his first appearance in 1974, decades before Deadpool. Even beyond the risk that came with Deadpool's relative lack of name recognition, the studio had pressing concerns when it came to the film's box office potential. Back then, there was little precedent for an R-rated comic book movie. It felt like it was going to alienate or keep out younger kids. There was no precedent for something that was essentially a parody without being a real parody.

Like the tone of Deadpool is so wildly different from anything that it existed before. Deadpool would eventually help open the door for more R-rated comic book movies like Logan and 2019's Joker, the latter of which became the first R-rated film ever to gross $1 billion at the box office. But before Deadpool, returns from R-rated comic book movies were mixed. One of the rare successes was Blade, the genre-bending 1998 film that starred Wesley Snipes as its vampire-hunting protagonist. As Fox continued to drag its feet with Deadpool, Reynolds went off and starred in DC's Green Lantern, leaving Reese and Wernick with little else to do on the project, but tinker with the script.

In this phase of Dead Bull's development limbo, the film found its director in Tim Miller. The script was fucking great before I showed up. It was already amazing and super funny, and the most memorable scenes were already there. Miller joined the project in 2011. He had never directed a feature film before, but Miller had impressed an executive at Fox with a cinematic short he created with his VFX house, Bluer Studio, that was tied to the DC Universe online video game. I knew the cost of it was a big deal,

and because I'm from a visual effects and animation background, primarily, I thought I can do big superhero action, but do it all CG, I'm not afraid to do that. Nobody is these days, but at the time it was a little more rare. And so Fox gave me a couple hundred grand to do a test for Deadpool. Miller created this test footage that depicted a CGI Deadpool, brutally taking out a moving car of armed henchmen on a highway,

all while making jokes and breaking the fourth wall. This scene would serve as the basis for Deadpool's memorable opening action sequence. It's a Corinthian leather. I'm looking for it. Have you seen this man? We showed it to Fox, and I still remember they're like, well, what part of this is live action? I said, well, none of it. And he, oh, yeah, okay, I know, but what part did you shoot?

And I said, none of it. And I said, if we did it for real, we would shoot some of this. I wouldn't do it all CG. But to go out on a highway and shoot with cameras, any part of it would have been that $200,000. It would have been a lot of money. So I just did it all CG. And they liked it. And then we did a budget.

And we put together a plan. And it gets to a point with the studio where they go, are you going to make it or not? And we got to that point. And they said, no, we don't see it. Despite the positive reception the test footage had among Fox executives, Deppwood would linger in development hell. But Miller, along with Reynolds, Reese and Wernick, kept applying pressure on the suits, doing whatever they could to win them over.

Every month for the next four years, I write an email to the head of the studio and basically, you know, and I would send statistics on the sales of the cost. comic book or, you know, all kinds of goofy things like that. And every time I would get a really respectful, Tim, we love your passion. It's really impressive how much you love this movie, but we're just not ready to make it. I asked Jim Cameron to write a letter of support, which he did. I asked David Fincher to write a letter of support, which he did. But it just never happened. But the writers and I, right and Paul, right and Paul were passionate.

so passionate about this, and they, every month we would say, let's do something else. And so eventually, we reached out to Simon Kimberg. I was, you know, working on the mainland X-Men films, and I got an email from Ret Rees and Paul Wernick. The subject's title of the email was, Deadpool needs your ass. And then when I opened up the email, ass continued into assistance. And so it was this request for me to come aboard and, support Deadpool, Rhett and Paul sent me the script. I flipped out for the script and called Emma Watts,

who was the present production and said, you guys got to make this movie. It's like the funniest, most entertaining thing I've read, maybe ever. And she was into it creatively, but also concerned for all of the, you know, all of the reasons I mentioned. She thought, maybe there's an opening for R-rated comics. It's an area that the rest of the Marvel universe doesn't seem to want to go or D.C., and maybe we can own that area, and then

the test leaked. By now, this test leak has pretty much become legend. To this day, no one knows how the footage was leaked in July 2014. Many have suspected that it was one of Miller, Reynolds, Reese, or Werenet. Whoever this mysterious individual may be,

the leak was the turning point for Deadpool. The way Miller tells the story, of how he first found out about it. It certainly doesn't sound like it was him. I happened to be coming back from Comic-Con, and I just gotten home, and my phone starts blowing up, and everybody's like, dude, you're fucking test leaked, you're fucking test leaked, oh shit.

And I thought I might throw up for a minute because I was sure that I was going to get in trouble, but it didn't work out that way. Test footage went viral, immediately winning over fans who were desperate to see more. Within weeks, Deadpool finally got the green light from Fox. It was huge. I don't know that they would have made it without it.

I'm certain they wouldn't have been me. The leak, obviously, of the short video helped show that there was a real audience, like a really vocal audience for it. And at a certain price point, which was a very low price point, it felt like it was not a big gamble. With the budget set just below $60 million, the production of Deadpool was finally on. Now, Miller and Reynolds just had to go make it. As agonizing as the way it was, all the extra years it took for Deadpool to get made helped

the film stick its landing in 2016. As Kimberg described earlier, the movie is essentially a parody without being a real parody, with a self-aware Deadpool serving as the perfect vessel to satirize superhero films from within one. With the rise of the MCU, the attempted rise of the DC Extended Universe, and the reboot of the X-Men franchise all happening at once during this restation period, Deadpool was accumulating a lot of material to work with. I think you can make an argument that Deadpool was really the anti-superhero movie. And had we made it five years earlier, there might not have been enough superhero material out in the zeitgeist to make Deadpool making fun of that work as well as it did five years later.

If the superhero genre were one big joke, as Martin Scorsese would probably argue, Those five years of comic book flicks were the setup, and Deadpool was the punchline. For context, just during Miller's involvement with the project from the beginning of 2011 to the end of 2015, Marvel Studios alone released nine movies. At the start of that period, the studio was still in the process of rolling out origin films for foundational MCU characters like Thor and Captain America in the lead-up to the Avengers. And by the end of it, the studio had already worked its way down to the likes of Ant-Man. No offense to Paul Rudd.

Until a trope exists, you can't really subvert the trope. And because there had been enough superhero films, we could do that. One of the superhero franchises that naturally became the butt of Deadpool's jokes was the X-Men. Between characters like Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, the X-Manshan serving as a periodic setting, and Hugh Jackman jokes galore, Deadpool references the X-Men a lot. You might wonder whether Fox was concerned about how its prize-like. collection of mutants would be depicted on screen, but the studio didn't interfere.

For better or worse, in the X-Men universe, Fox X-Men universe, we didn't have the same kind of like really rigid continuity that the MCU has. And Deadpool even makes a joke about it a few times. Let us go talk to the professor. McAvoy or Stewart, these timelines are so confusing. And he's not wrong. Like there is actually, you know, contradictions and inconsistencies that we know and we own and we get in a lot of trouble for on Twitter and other places. But ultimately, you know, our goal was to let filmmakers

make whatever they thought was the best version of the movie. Deadpool would finally arrive in theaters on February 12, 2016, just in time for President's Day weekend. With its brutal action sequences, riot as fourth wall breaks, and R-rated comedic tone, it was everything comic book fans had hoped it would be and more. And tying it all together, was the man behind the mask, Ryan Reynolds. He'd been dreaming of this moment and doing everything he could to make it a reality for more than a decade. Ryan is the creative center engine supernova, whatever you want to call it for the Deadpool films. I mean, he really is as much or more the author of those movies than Rob Leifeld or the filmmakers themselves.

He's a, from the script phase to shooting, to being really involved in post-production, to rewriting ADR down to the last second when they ripped the film out of your hands and have to put it in movie theaters. He is a tireless, extraordinary, incredibly involved, filmmaking force and obviously extraordinary actor too on screen. But I don't know that I've seen any other producer, let alone an actor-producer, but producer be that intimately involved in every phase and stage of making a movie. It might have been a Hollywood Odyssey for Reynolds and a long journey for Reese, Wernick, and Miller, too. But together, they made a film that they, and Fox, could all be proud of. What they did not anticipate was just how well it would perform at the box office. Even on the opening night, they thought, and me too, you know, we'd be lucky if we made $50 million opening weekend.

I mean, we made that movie for a fraction of the price that we made the X-Men movies, or even a fraction of the price that we made the Wolverine movies, to cap the risk. and none of us ever would have remotely imagined that it was going to be the kind of hit that it was. It would make more money than in the X-Men movie. Deadpool cleared almost $50 million domestically on its opening day alone, en route to earning $152 million by the end of the holiday weekend. All told, Deadpool grossed $783 million worldwide,

becoming the highest grossing R-rated film ever made to that point. After the huge success of Deadpool, a sequel was inevitable. but Miller would not get to direct it. Due to creative differences with Reynolds, Miller was replaced by David Leach. Deadpool 2, released in 2018, introduced Josh Brolin at the time-traveling mutant cable, uniting another one of Rob Leifeld's comic book creations

with Deadpool on screen for the first time. While the movie scored well with audiences and critics alike, its global take of $734 million was slightly smaller than its predecessors. The studio eventually re-released a PG-13 version of the movie, called Once Upon a Deadpool, which opened it up to international markets like China. That re-release pushed the global box office hall up to $786 million, just clearing the original. Nearly a decade after the original Deadpool's release, Miller doesn't concern himself too much with its legacy or whether it changed the genre.

I just feel like I was the luckiest nerd on the planet to get a chance to make it, but I can't say that there was any hint of an agenda or any kind of feeling that I was going to change history or I didn't have a message. I'm like, I'm going to fucking change the way superhero movies are made. Nothing like that. It was just like that's what this character does. That was the DNA of this character. Regardless, the risks that the first Deadpool took

helped redefine what was possible in an on-screen superhero project. It's hard to tell whether Fox would have been willing to move forward with Logan, if not for the film's success. Other irreverent, ultra-violent superhero stories outside the Marvel umbrella, like the boys, Invincible, and the suicide squad may also owe Deadpool a debt. And obviously, without Deadpool, there would be no Deadpool too. And no Deadpool in Wolverine,

the temple that Marvel's current hopes are hinging on. This episode is brought to by the Active Cash Credit Card from Wells Fargo. That's a mouthful, but that's because it packs a lot in. Earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases with it big or small. So whether it's buying tickets to the game and grabbing a coffee, It earns unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Say it with me, the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo. Be a 2%er.

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a registered futures commission merchant. 18 plus. Trading derivatives involve significant risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Manage your activity with our consumer protection tools. Just five years ago, Deadpool and Wolverine wouldn't have been possible to make, at least not in the form that the film will take later this month.

It could have happened at 20th century Fox, technically, but Marvel Studios wouldn't have had anything to do with it. Back in the 90s, when Marvel was struggling to, to stay afloat, the company gave up the rights to some of its most prized characters. Lauren Shuler-Doner helped Fox secure the rights to the X-Men in 1994 for a reported $2.6 million, while Sony paid $10 million for the film rights to Spider-Man in 1999, with Marvel also receiving 5% of any Spider-Man films gross and half the toy revenue. In hindsight, these deals sound absurd.

But Marvel made them while at its most vulnerable, and those moves did help get the brand on the big screen after the company struggled to get low-budget TV shows like X-Men the Animated series made. The downside was that once Marvel Studios started producing its own movies, with Disney taking over all distribution by 2012, the film rights to some of Marvel's most valuable characters still belong to some of these other companies. Over the years, Marvel worked around this impediment

by making some licensing deals to include characters like Spider-Man and the Hulk in its own productions or co-productions, even as other studios retained distribution rights. But the Fox Zone superheroes were noticeably shut out of the Infinity Saga. Marvel Studios couldn't leverage two of its most popular comic book titles in The X-Men and Fantastic Four, which was a source of frustration for Marvel executives and fans alike. That all changed in 2019 when Disney bought 21st Century Fox, the parent company of 20th Century Fox, for $71.3 billion.

Disney, towards the end of the 2010s, was looking at the media landscape and seeing the rise of streaming and net-finding. and the tech powers like Apple and Amazon getting into traditional entertainment. That's Matt Bellany, Hollywood insider and founding member of the digital media company, Puck. He's also the host of the Ringers of the Town Podcast. And what they essentially decided was, we're not big enough. In order to compete in the next iteration of the entertainment business, we have to be as big as possible to compete with those large tech powers.

So they looked around the landscape and all of a sudden, one day, Bob Eiger, the CEO, got a call from Rupert Murdoch asking to come over to his winery in Bel Air and have a little bit of wine and talk. And what came out of that was the deal that we saw, which was Disney's agreement to buy most of the Fox company, the studio, the television studio, the networks that were not the Fox broadcast network like FX. and a couple others. Disney also got Fox's share of Hulu, giving it a majority stake in the company. And they got Fox's movie properties, and that included the Marvel movies. In the landmark deal were $71.3 billion,

a price so nice I had to say it twice. It's important to keep in perspective that the return of Marvel IP rights was just one small piece of the big picture. That said, it's a pretty sweet part of the picture. the Fox Marvel properties are a hidden gem in that deal. They are untapped by Marvel Studios. And that doesn't mean they haven't been exploited in the past.

Obviously, there have been many X-Men movies. There have been versions of a lot of these franchises. But they haven't been shepherded by Disney and by Kevin Feigey. And I think it's been a missing element here. Feigey loves these properties, loves X-Men, loves Fantastic 4, loves Deadpool, and they haven't been able to fully integrate that into the overall MCU. What is exciting about this to Fagie and the Marvel people is the opportunity to take on these very well-known franchises and kind of reinvent them under the

MCU and under the Marvel imprimatur. The timing of this deal, which closed just just before the climax of the Infinity saga was perfect for Marvel. And it's become even more important in the past few years, because as I mentioned earlier, Marvel Studios is in a serious slump. Critic and audience scores for its movies and TV shows have been trending downward, while box office numbers and viewership totals have been free-falling, at least by Marvel's lofty standards. So what went wrong?

If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you have some opinion on what has led to Marvel's falloff in recent years. I posed some form of this question to Bellany, Joanna Robinson, and Dave Gonzalez. And there are plenty of factors at play. All of the Disney creative engines misfired at the same time. Not all, but most of them. You look at what's going on with Pixar and Disney Animation. You look at what's going on with some of the television assets.

Then you look what's going on with Marvel and Lucasfilm. And Marvel's an interesting one because I think the Pendon, and this rush to create more, more, more, more for Disney Plus really overtapped that creative engine. I think it made them work at speeds they were not comfortable with. It made the volume, the priority rather than the quality. That churn, that constant pressure to go, go, go, everyone is stretched very thin, especially Kevin Feige, who used to have this very sort of tight control over quality control over what came out. And you have to start letting some things go and delegating when you're doing so much more.

It's understandable. A lot of people think from phases one through three that Marvel had it like figured out when really they just had enough time in between movies to sort of kick some things into better shape. And now with phase four and the beginning of phase five with Marvel studios, including Disney Plus content, there's less wiggle room to make everything feel as a piece. Audiences are starting to react to the sort of idea that there will be another Marvel thing, but without the core thing that happened from 2008 to 2019, which was each movie felt like a sequel to the movie that came before it. Now that sort of continuity has been broken because the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in so many. different places at once. The crunch for more content spilled over

into a very noticeable decline in VFX quality in both Marvel's TV shows and movies. Just think of that floating head known as Modoc and Ant Man of the Wasp Quantumania, or Dr. Strange's goofy-looking third eye. Disney created these types of problems when they decided to roll out Disney Plus and lean on Marvel to bolster the streaming services

subscription growth. But there have been plenty of other factors outside of Disney's control. Some of the stars of the Infinity Saga, including Chris Evans, Joe Hansen and Robert Downey Jr. left the franchise after becoming too expensive for Marvel to keep under contract or simply deciding to move on to new roles. Marvel wanted to construct a core cast of characters to replace them in its new cinematic era. But that wouldn't be so easy.

Here's Robinson again. As I said as we are to meet new heroes after the Infinity Saga, they wanted some carryover, some established people. If you go back to when Chadwick Bozeman was announced, he was announced by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans at this event at El Capitan. It was like this real coronation of someone coming into the franchise. And so when Chadwick Boseman tragically passes away, when Brie Larson's Captain Marvel doesn't land with audiences the way that they hoped and expected her to, when a little bit later, but Chris Hemsworth decides he wants to take a bit of a step back from the franchise, when all these sort of things happen with all these people that

they thought they had in place, then they're on shakier ground than they had planned to be coming off of the Infinity Saga. Marvel also chose Jonathan Majors to play the central antagonist in the multiverse saga, but part of ways of them after he was convicted on assault and harassment charges in December 2023. There was even unexpected turnover within Marvel Studios, as longtime executive Victoria Lonzo was fired in March 2023. The list of issues for Marvel grew lengthier, all while was releasing movies and TV shows that no longer

felt like must-see events. The studio still has some tricks, and in Loki's case, tricksters, up its sleeve, but the Marvel Magic has started to wear off. And the fans have noticed, even if they are still showing up most of the time. What we're seeing over and over again, both with Marvel and with other franchises,

is audiences are rejecting more of the same. It used to be enough to just get the gang back together, run the hit playbook, and people would show up. That is not true. anymore. If it feels stale, if you're not giving us new and added value elements, if you're not approaching the material from a fresh perspective, there's no excitement. Although the Disney Fox deal was finalized in 2019, Marvel has wisely taken its time to make use of the fruits of the

acquisition. At first, most MCU appearances by the previously Fox Zone characters came in the form of minor cameos or allusions to the X-Men. In Wanda Vision, Evan Peters casting as a fake Pieter Maximoff played off of the audience's memory of the actor's performances as Quicksilver in the X-Men films. Patrick Stewart reprised his role as Professor Xavier and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The film that also included John Krasinski as the fan cast Reed Richards.

The Dr. Strange sequel even incorporated a subtle musical nod to the iconic theme of X-Men the animated series. We should tell him the truth. Our final member, Professor Charles Xavier. But 2024 is the year that X-Men have truly returned to Marvel. Just as X-Men the Animated series cleared the runway for the first live-action X-Men movie in 2000,

the Disney Plus revival, X-Men 97, was released this spring to stoke excitement for the X-Men's imminent MCU debut. X-Men 97 has been such a smash hit with the audience it needed to connect with. I know it's not like the most watched thing that has ever happened on Disney Plus, but it has really won the respect and admiration of, the hardcore audience, and that's who Marvel reached out to in the first place when they made Iron Man. You have to have your base to build from. And X-Men 97, which has convincingly shown a love for the source material and a deep bench of knowledge in the source material, and just excellent storytelling, has, I think, really

won back the core that Marvel really needs to sort of build. build back their base room. We should say they're not starting from zero, obviously. Like Marvel is still incredibly popular. I'm not saying that, but they need that sort of spine of the fandom back. Led by creator Beau DiMaio and supervising director,

Jake Hasterena. X-Men 97 picks up right where X-Men the Animated series left off when it concluded in 1997, hence the name. The show manages to recapture the spirit of the original series while imbueing it with fresh ideas and a style that's fit for the modern era. And it even brought back some of the key creatives behind X-Men the animated series as consultants,

including director Larry Houston, showrunner Eric Lee-Walt, and writer Julie Lee-Wald. But they all deserve insane credit for what they've done. We all see these things. Reboots, re-imagining, just extensions, iterations, whatever you want to call it.

The fidelity to what is the heart of X-Men and X-Men the animated series is breathtaking. They know it better than we did. And it shows. X-Men 97 is a bit of a full-circle moment for Marvel, and the return of the live-action X-Men franchise, starting with Deadpool and Wolverine this summer, is a full-circle moment for Kevin Figey too.

Back when Figey was just an assistant to Lauren Shuler-Donner, he once drove Hugh Jackman to the airport when both he and Jackman knew the actor wouldn't be getting the Wolverine part in X-Men. They even stopped to grab dinner along the way. Fikey didn't have much control over the franchise back then, but he still exerted its influence in various. ways over its development and production. More than 20 years later,

he's the most important figure at Marvel. Just when the MCU needs them the most, characters like Wolverine, Deadpool, and the Fantastic Four are back in the studio's control and Kevin Feige's control. The former Fox characters will need to play a big role in helping turn things around at Marvel. Matt Bellany says that's already very much in the works.

And if you look at what they're doing over the next five to seven years, there are big plans to really make the Fox properties the centerpiece of the Marvel movie universe. So you look at what's going on with Deadpool this year. You look at what's going on with Fantastic Four, which they are casting up and about to start filming. They have big plans for X-Men that will span across film and television. Alongside the Avengers storyline, which is sort of sputtered in recent years, I think Disney and Marvel looks at the Fox properties as the biggest. opportunity here.

It's still going to take some time for Marvel Studios to properly reboot the X-Men on the big screen. There haven't been any release dates or casting announcements for a film yet. And while the anticipation continues to build, Marvel is purposely slowing down its output to collect itself, tease the arrival of other releases, like the Fantastic Four film, and clear out the 2024 calendar for one big box office bed, Deadpool and Wolverine. When the Disney Fox deal was first announced in 2017, Deadpool 2 hadn't been released yet. but the production was well underway.

Upon seeing the news, Ryan Reynolds couldn't help sharing his thoughts about it on Twitter. He wrote, Time to uncork that explosive sexual tension between Deadpool and Mickey Mouse. After Deadpool 2 premiered in 2018, it took some time for development on Deadpool 3 to get going. The finalization of the Disney Fox Agreement

put the project on hold, and in 2019, Paul Wernick told reporters that he, his writing partner, Red Reese, and Reynolds, were, quote, getting a much-needed rest from Deadpool, end quote. as they waited to see how the franchise would fit in Marvel Studios' plans. In November 2020, it was announced that Bob's Berger's writers, Wendy and Lizzie Molyneux were working on a script of the film,

and a multi-year search for a director concluded in early 2022, when Deadpool 3 landed Sean Levy. Levy had recently worked with Reynolds on a pair of films, 2021's Free Guy, and 2022's The Adam Project. A decade earlier, he had directed 2011's Real Steel, starring Hugh Jackman. And while Reynolds had long hoped to lure Jackman into the Deadpool franchise, Levy joined the development process on the three-quel under the assumption that a team-up between their characters was off the table.

Ryan and I spent several months with our co-writers working on possible stories for Deadpool 3, which is how we referred to it back then. And in real life, it happens to be that Ryan, Hugh, and I are all very good friends. But we just assumed that Logan stuck the landing. Hugh had always been really clear about the fact that he was hanging up the clause and at peace with that decision. And literally in the summer of 2022, while Ryan and I were still very much hashing out possible ideas for this movie, Hugh called out of the blue and basically said, I've had an epiphany. I want to come back and I want to be a part of this Deadpool movie. I want for myself as Hugh Jackman and for audiences, I want the joy of what that duo might be. And so contrary to a lot of rumors out there, it wasn't the result of Ryan or I chasing Hugh.

It wasn't the result of Fygie and Marvel begging Hugh. It was something shifted inside Hugh that gave him clarity about what this pairing could be. And the fact that, yeah, you know what? he wanted it in his life and he wanted it for this character. Kevin Feigy told Empire Magazine that he had originally warned Jackman against returning to the role for this film. Feigy told Jackman, you had the greatest ending in history with Logan. That's not something we should undo.

But Jackman had evidently already made up his mind. And you tried telling Wolverine no. Within a day of that phone call, what had been a bunch of vague, general, possible ideas for the story, it instantly crystallized. And the arrival of Wolverine into this story, literally as Ryan often says, it suddenly gave us our why. Why make this movie? Why is it different? Well, the answer is the Wolverine.

When Jackman came into the picture, everything about the movie shifted, down to the fact that it was no longer going to be called Deadpool 3, but Deadpool and Wolverine. It isn't just the Deadpool sequel anymore, but a union of two franchises and two beloved characters. Their history together predates any of the Fox Marvel movies, going all the way back to when Rob Leifeld drew inspiration from Wolverine as he created the Deadpool character, even linking their origins through the Weapon X program. While recounting the shift in the film's story, Levy discusses the cinematic duos that inspired this pairing. Whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, midnight run, 48 hours, the legacy of oil and water, two-hand. is extensive and again, it's always based in conflict. Watching conflict between characters who are forced together is kind of fun. At the same time, Deadpool and Wolverine are tied together by their shared traumatic experiences.

These are two characters who are both haunted with regret, haunted with trauma. In the case of Wade, it's obviously, you know, his sickness and what he did to survive and how he feels about himself in the aftermath of that decision. And for Logan, it's a couple of centuries worth of behavior that he's not proud of. And so you've got just this deeper level of shame and regret that haunts both characters. I want to talk about what's haunting you, or should we wait for a third act? Flashback. Uh, go fuck yourself. Since Jackman first suited up as Wolverine in 2000, his character has been through a lot on

screen. To quickly recap some highlights or lowlights of Wolverine's history on screen, here's Midnight Boy, Jomi Adoneron. Wolverine's life is cooked, right? Let's just go through it. When he was a boy, he killed the man who he thought murdered his father, but the man he killed turned out to be his actual father. What?

He found this of war, both World Wars, and and Avidavitamore. He survived America's bombing of Nagasaki, problematic, saving a Japanese soldier in the process. He held his dying girlfriend in his arms only to find out she was faking it and working with this mortal enemy. Ah, that'll kill some trust.

He was nearly launched off the Statue of Liberty's crown. He faced three different versions of Williams-Tracker, played by three different actors. He was forced to kill Jean Grey, another woman that he loved. He traveled through time. and then he died, like, a lot, multiple times, but one time he died for real. It was really sad, and we all cried at the theater.

That's a fair amount of trauma right there, and plenty of questionable narrative choices. But the latter brings up an important question heading into Deadpool and Wolverine. If Wolverine died in Logan, how is he still alive? As the film's trailer helpfully teases, the answer lies in the multiverse. Not my fucking problem.

Is that what you said when your world went to shit? Come again. This Wolverine let down his entire world. The mutant variant we meet in Deadpool and Wolverine is a different version of the character, which is certainly one way to avoid undercutting Logan's ending. Levy has a deep respect for the Wolverine films, and he learned from them too.

To Hugh's credit and to Mangold's credit, those movies, particularly the last one that Mangold and Hugh made together in Logan, it really showed me how profound a character Logan is and how you can make a variety of genre pictures all using the same character of Wolverine, right? Whether it's Days of Future Past or The Wolverine or Logan, same character, very different movies.

And over the decade plus since I made Real Steel, I came to realize, A, just how fascinating a character Logan can be. And I also realized with a big, clear idea, a sequel can avoid repetition. A sequel can avoid being derivative. It can be fresh and it can stand on new strong legs of its own. Deadpool and Wolverine is still, of course, a sequel. It might not be Deadpool 3 anymore, but it's largely an extension of a Deadpool franchise, down to the fact that Reynolds, Wernick, and Reese are co-writers of the film.

That creative team dates all the way back to the beginning of Deadpool's journey, to the times we heard about earlier when it was a struggle to get the Merck with the mouth of movie. Ryan has this intuition and instinct for what a Deadpool movie wants to be, and that is always our kind of shepherd, if you will. Wernick and Reese, who wrote those Deadpool movies with Ryan, they're also keepers of the faith and keepers of the tone. And so for Zeb Wells and I, who were the other writers on this, for the five of us to work together, it was really fun because not only was there a consistency with the past, but this new dynamic between all of us resulted in some really fresh storytelling that is still very faithful. to the Deadpool tone, but takes it places that maybe the other Deadpool movies and, for that matter, the other Wolverine movies haven't yet done. As much as Levy stresses the creative team's desire to create something new with this movie, his point about remaining faithful to the Deadpool tone is an important one.

Even before the Disney Fox acquisition was finalized, Marvel fans, understandably, began to worry about the fate of Deadpool now that the character would be taking up residence in the House of Mouse. given Disney's family-friendly sensibilities, as well as Marvel's, an R-rated Deadpool movie seemed impossible. The very first MCU movie to drop the Unholy F-bomb was Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, which came out last year. The first sex scene didn't happen until Eternals in 2021, and even then it felt weird. But Disney has granted Deadpool and Wolverine

the chance to become another first for Marvel Studios, an R-rated movie. And it sounds like that freedom has given the creator more than just the opportunity to let Deadpool keep cursing. Whatever anxiety I had going in about working within the MCU, working with Marvel Studios early on, day one, Fagie, Lou D. Esposito, the whole team at Marvel and, frankly, Disney, they knew what we work when we came in the door.

When we came in the door, we made it clear, this is going to be the tone. We're not softening the edges. We're not going to dilute it. we're going to be off the wall audacious in the way that all of us want a Deadpool movie to be. So there was buy-in from the jump. And as a result, even though we are the first, we were able to operate with massive, frankly, near absolute creative freedom. I've made like 14 movies or something like that. It's the first one for Marvel.

but I had every bit of the creative autonomy that I've had on my original movies. In fact, Levy might have had more than the usual amount of creative freedom because of a development that initially seemed like a setback, the 2023 Sag After Strike. The actors' strike halted Deadpool and Wolverine's production exactly halfway through their shooting schedule, and although that's late at its release, it may have improved the finished product. It was obviously a hard time because a lot of people weren't making a living. The only silver lining in regards to this movie is that while I was unable to shoot,

I was able to edit. And so I spent those months editing the half of the movie that I had shot. And when you sit in the edit room, you learn about your movie and you listen to your movie and the movie tells you what it is. And the movie tells you what it wants. So what that meant is when I went back for part two, I knew what the movie. movie was. And so I was able to hone performances. I was able to rewrite certain scenes. I was able to shift and lean into stuff that I knew the movie wanted most. But this was a rare

opportunity with a live action movie to learn those things midway through. And I think the movie is better for it. For a movie that's been this long in the making, what's a few more months? Given how distinctive the Deadpool movies are within the world of superhero films, the franchise wasn't guaranteed to play well with the MCU's approach. Marvel Studios has long been criticized for being too uniform and formulaic. For years, MCU films and TV shows have suffered from narrative or stylistic pitfalls that draw attention to the fact that, despite all the studio's commercial success, there are downsides to telling stories in an interconnected cinematic universe.

Creative differences has become a familiar euphemism for an outgoing filmmaker's refusal to bend to Marvel's will. But based on the way Levy describes it, and what we can see in the trailers, Deadpool and Wolverine doesn't seem to be limited by any wider MCU agenda. Instead, the film appears to be using its new shared universe of superheroes to its advantage. Deadpool can now expand its target range of fourth-wall breaking jokes to a combined film catalog of more than 30 movies and dozens of TV shows, with all of the characters and worlds that come with them. And what better time is there to make fun of the MCU than right now?

In the teasers for Deadpool and Wolverine, one familiar setting from the MCU is the Time Variant Authority from Loki. The Disney Plus series introduced this bureaucratic organization and its Minutemen as the timeline cops of the MCU, entrusted to protect the sanctity of the Marvel canon. With its built-in connection to the multiverse, the TVA offers a seamless way for Deadpool and Wolverine to be plucked out of their worlds and into a new story of their own. Because the film was produced by Marvel, leaving his team had access to the studio's resources and directory of creatives too. When it was time to design new sets within the TVA or use Minuteman or other touchstones of TVA mythology,

the group that did Loki were always a phone call or an email away. The art department files from Loki and related to the TVA. those were accessible. So we definitely didn't want to simply replicate what we've seen in other Marvel stories, but we did want to honor it, and we did want to be consistent with the very specific aesthetic, for instance,

that has been established via Loki in regards to the TVA. So we would call them, or we would ask for their illustrations, or we would take an illustration of ours and run it by some of the people who had worked on other aspects of the TVA. So there was a collaboration in-house

that always kept us honest, made sure we were pushing the mythology and the aesthetics further without ever abandoning or running counter to what's been established already. Thanks to the narrative flexibility provided by the multiverse,

Depple and Wolverine can draw in the established history of the MCU without being tethered to any specific part of its pre-existing story. And it also has the freedom to call back to Fox's fallen X-Men universe, now rattling around in the void of the MCU. Rumors of the film's cameos have been circulating online for months, and the Deadpool and Wolverine trailers have already shown glimpses of returning X-Men characters,

like Sabretooth from the original X-Men movie, Lady Death Strike from X-2, and the Firebending Pyrro from X-2 in The Last Stand. The narrative and crossover opportunities are seemingly endless, but Deadpool and Wolverine's appeal boils down to the long-weighted partnership of its titular duo. The movie appears to be the pinnacle of superhero fan service, down to the fact that Hugh Jackman is finally suiting up in Wolverine's classic, yellow and blue costume from the comics and X-Men the animated series.

There are so many past superhero stories woven into the fabric of this film, reaching back decades to when comics were still in the fringes of popular culture. When you make a movie like this, you're telling a specific story, but I'm always humbled and aware of the fact that you're inheriting decades. of cultural love. You're inheriting a culture's history with these characters. And so I'm telling this story. But the blood that runs through that body is the Marvel lore through comics and movies

and shows. The blood that's pumping inside that body is our collective adoration of the Marvel world. and the mythology of these characters that runs deep. With the MCU as the new virtually boundless setting, Reynolds' Deadpool and Jackman's Wolverine will finally reunite after all these years. This time, without any sewn-up mouths. It's a real privilege not only to play in a sandbox with this many toys,

but to tell a story involving two icons, two iconic movie stars in their most iconic characters together. That is a delight. Given all the doom saying about the supposed fall of the MCU and the pivotal part that former Fox IP is playing for Marvel Studios, the reception and box office of Deadpool and Wolverine will be crucial to the company's future. Kevin Feige still has his work cut out for him

in cleaning up the mess that is the multiverse saga as phase six looms around the corner. This film might restore fans' faith in the future of the franchise, as the MCU leverages years' worth of Nairder Funway obtained in the Disney Fox deal. It could also be another misfire, reinforcing any doubts that Marvel will ever be able to get back on track. Or, the film could simply stand as an outlier, thanks to its unique nature and history. Whatever happens, Deadpool and Wolverine will be the culmination of decades of superhero storytelling. From the success of the comics, to Stan Lee and Margaret Lesh's efforts to convince anyone

that X-Men could appeal to viewers. From leaked test footage to a corporate deal worth tens of billions of dollars, all the way to a phone call that reshaved an entire story. Deadpool and Wolverine might just be another superhero movie, but it's also the conclusion of a long, messy story that shows just how far Marvel and its superhero movies have come. And Marvel hopes how far they have to go. This narrative audio feature was written and reported by me, Daniel Chin.

The executive producers are Mallory Rubin, Juliet Lipman and Sean Fennacy. Story editing by Ben Lindberg. This feature was produced by Bobby Wagner and Vikram Patel. Talent booking by Katzbelaine. Fact-checking by Juliana Ress. Copy editing by Jack McCluskey. Sound design by Bobby Wagner.

Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music you heard in this feature is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. In researching this feature, I relied a lot on MCU, The Rain of Marvel Studios, written by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez, and Gavin Edwards. It's a great read, and if you enjoyed this feature, I'm sure you'd love the book, too. And last, special thanks to our Juno Ranga Pau and Jomea Dena. Thanks for listening.