How many times have you already watched theDeadpooltrailer that debuted last night onConan? Well, you surely missed some aspects of this epic,blood-soaked footage. There are plenty of little Easter eggs and not so obvious nods to theMarvel comic booksupon which it is based. Director Tim Miller, who makes his directorial debut with this anticipatedX-Men spinoff, joinedEmpiremagazine for a comprehensive breakdown of every main shot, and the meaning behind it. First and foremost, he seems to understand that fans weren’t happy the first time the Merc with the Mouth made it to the big screen.
“Everyone hates what they did to Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but nobody blames Ryan for it.”
Since the 2009 releaseX-Men Origins: Wolverine, which inexplicably sewed one of Marvel’s most talkative character’s mouth shut,Ryan Reynoldshas aggressively tried to reboot the character on the big screen. Many years went by with the film sitting indevelopment Hell. Butleaked test footagewowed fans, and proved to 20th Century Fox that the movie needed to get made. And it needed to be R rated.
Based uponMarvel Comicsmost unconventional anti-hero,Deadpooltells the origin story of former Special Forces operative turned mercenary Wade Wilson, who after being subjected to a rogue experiment that leaves him with accelerated healing powers, adopts the alter egoDeadpool. Armed with his new abilities and a dark, twisted sense of humor,Deadpoolhunts down the man who nearly destroyed his life.
Joining the Merc With the Mouth isMorena Baccarinas Vanessa Carlyle, a.k.a. Copycat,Gina Caranoas Angel Dust,Ed Skreinas Ajax,T.J. Milleras Weasel andBrianna Hildebrandas Negasonic Teenage Warhead.Tim Millerdirects from a screenplay byRhett ReeseandPaul Wernick, based on the Marvel Comics character created byRob Liefeld.Deadpoolwas one of the big hits at SDCC last month, positioning the superhero movie to possibly become one of 2016’s first big blockbusters at the box office, when it debuts August 10, 2025. From the trailer reactions, it appeared this team has completely nailed this new adaptation of the Marvel hero.
You can now follow along as director Tim Miller goes through the trailer shot by shot. We’ve included the coolest and most interesting tidbits here. To get a more comprehensive breakdown,visit Empire. Here, Tim Miller looks at the characters, and delves into some of the lesser known aspects of theDeadpoolmythos. He reveals that X-Men actorDaniel Cudmorewas approached to be in the movie, but he’d only appear in CGI. The director even goes onto tease a sequel.
8Wade & Vanessa
We flash backwards and forwards in time throughout the movie, so this scene of Wade before he’s Deadpool doesn’t necessarily come as early as you’d think. But even if you were to place it linearly, it would still probably come about 20 minutes in. We meet Wade before he’s met Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), when he’s a kind of small-time mercenary. Then he meets her and falls in love, and then they learn he’s got cancer. So this scene is post-cancer.
7Green Lantern
For the most part, we attempt to stick to the rule that Wade Wilson can’t break the fourth wall. He’s not aware that he’s in a movie. Deadpool is. He only breaks the fourth wall when he’s Deadpool. So we’re tiptoeing on the edge of breaking our own rule there, because he’s still Wade at that point. We shot a few more Green Lantern jokes, but I’m not sure how many will survive the cut. Ryan definitely had some Green Lantern issues to work out. We had about a minute’s worth of dialogue between him and Colossus where he talks about it, like, ‘So a guy comes with a thousand-dollar suit and says, “We want you to play a superhero,” but there’s no script yet and the release date is completely unmakeable…’ He goes on this whole anti-Green Lantern run, but I’m not sure it’ll stay in, because probably not even half the people in the theaters will get those jokes. You can’t only play to the comic fans. He’s spouting weird shit all the time, and if you don’t pick up on every joke, that’s fine. But you can’t leave everybody behind all the time. Any joke that an audience needs to look up on the internet after the movie is not something I’m in favour of. But that scene’s one for the DVD extras, for sure.
6Jed Rees is The Recruiter
That’s Jed Rees, who plays The Recruiter. He was great. He was the main alien in Galaxy Quest: that’s what I knew him from! He did a good job of being creepy and syrupy sweet. The ‘superhero’ thing is a big issue for fans of Deadpool, and certainly with us. Deadpool’s not a superhero. He doesn’t want to be a superhero. He doesn’t like superheroes. So the whole idea of him potentially becoming a superhero is treated with disdain. We recorded a voiceover this morning where Wade is like, ‘Even if you have cancer, just murdered a man in Mexico and you’re on the brink of death, if someone offers you the choice to become a superhero, the answer should be no…
5Sword Fight
I can honestly say that nobody worked harder than Ed Skrein did. I loved that guy. He just has the best attitude ever. He trained really hard. He has some good moves and he’s really athletic, but he worked really, really hard with our stunt coordinators to do the best he could. Probably 80 per cent of what you see on screen is him. The only time we took him out was if we were doing some kind of rigged stunt. Ryan’s amazing too. Ryan didn’t train nearly as hard as Ed, but he’s uncanny. He has, like, photographic reflexes or something. We’d have the stunt guys do stuff and then I’d have Ryan come in and do a take or two, and I’ve almost always ended up using Ryan’s takes. He can learn choreography in seconds. Second unit shot three days of that fight in the car, and then I went in for one day with Ryan to pick up the character beats and a few other moves, and we ended up reshooting basically the whole thing with Ryan in that single day. We shot a fight in a warehouse where for Ryan it was six hours in make-up and then a 16-hour day, and he never complained. Ed was the same way, and then we did a whole other day with Ed right on top of that. And all that time, Ed was like, ‘Don’t let the stunt guy do this!’ He was hopping on his toes the whole time, ready to jump in. ‘Put me in, Coach! Put me in!’
We just wanted to show that Deadpool is this perfect mix of athleticism and accuracy: he’s got these Bullseye-like reflexes, especially with the guns and katanas. This is the end of the Twelve Bullets sequence, where he ends up with one bullet but he’s still got three guys to kill, so he waits for this perfect moment to do this super-cool move and take them all out with one shot. It was always a great moment in the script, and it turned out well. Everybody thought it was horribly gory, but I don’t think it’s that bad!
We were never going to be able to keep Colossus as a secret. He was in the script that leaked and all that. I wasn’t actually sure, until we were standing there shooting it, that at some point Fox was going to say, ‘Hold on a second; we can’t put Colossus from our treasured X-Men franchise in this movie to be made fun of!’ But they did, and not only that, but also they let me change the look of him. As a fanboy I’ve always been like, ‘That dude with the shiny skin is not fucking Colossus.’ He should be this monstrous guy, and they actually let me make him seven-and-a-half feet tall. I did actually call Daniel Cudmore to ask him if he wanted to do this, even though he’d be entirely CG the whole time. He was very nice about it. He was like, ‘I appreciate your offering, but nah.’
2Negasonic Teenage Warhead
In the original script the action in the third act was great, but it was just Deadpool and a lot of guns. One of my notes early on was that I wanted to see more superhero stuff. We had Garrison Kane in there for a while, but in the final round of budget cuts we had to take him out, because he was a pretty expensive dude. He’s got these bionic arms that change shape; he would have been a visual effect for a large part of the movie. And as it turned out, a visual effect too far. I went through the list of Marvel characters and picked a few others I thought could be visually spectacular and fun. And at the end of that list was Negasonic, which I just thought was a freaky, funny name. And I sent this list over to the writers, Rhett (Reese) and Paul (Wernick), and they were like, ‘Oh my fucking god, we have to use her!’ So that’s how she ended up in the movie. Her name was cool, and we kind of wanted a straight-man to play against Colossus. We thought about Cannonball, but he would’ve been a stupid hick character, whereas the guys wrote Negasonic as this deadpan goth teen, which was a great angle. She turned out really well. There aren’t really many definitive Deadpool villains, apart from Cable. If we don’t put Cable in Deadpool 2 I think we’ll be run out of town on a rail.
1Deleted Comic-Con Scenes
The Comic-Con trailer was a little bit longer. This version had to be shorter, for whatever reason, so the things that got taken out were a couple of real in-joke things that, again, wouldn’t necessarily play to a general audience. Stan Lee was in the Comic-Con trailer, and there was another shot with Rob Liefeld, Deadpool’s creator. Those moments were for the Comic-Con fans. It went over so well at Comic-Con. Everybody there was so primed to like this film. It didn’t go to my head at all. I came out just thinking, ‘Fuck, now we really have to deliver!’ We were kind of under the radar before, at least within Fox. That’s all over now…
What do you think? Do you feel like you have a better sense of this superhero adventure? We’ve included both the red band and green band trailer for you to watch again here. And be sure to check out the entire running commentary onEmpire.
