The following article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine
Robert Downey Jr., the actor who played Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for more than 10 years, was going to appear in a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine. Considering the film is already cameo bliss, the addition of Iron Man to the show would have been nothing but epic. However, there were some (extremely important) plans brewing for Downey, as you may already know.
This surprising bit of news came from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, co-writers of Deadpool & Wolverine (and also previous Deadpool movies), who shared some curious developments from the production of the Shawn Levy film. While some cameos made it to the editing room, there were others that just couldn’t be accomplished, and that includes Downey’s performance as Iron Man for Wade’s pivotal interview to become an Avenger. However, something happened.
In an interview with IndieWire, Reese and Wernick revealed that Wade’s interview with Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) also included Stark in the room. Wernick says, “We had wanted him to do a cameo. We had written that scene [to start] with Happy and Downey.” Reese confirms the “audition” also took place behind the cameras: “Ryan Reynolds read the scene with both of them, so in the hopes we could get Downey. But he also wanted Favreau, because they’re a great combo, and they were all in the scene together.”
Deadpool & Wolverine
3.5/5
A follow-up to the highly successful Deadpool and Deadpool 2 films starring Ryan Reynolds as the Merc with a Mouth. The third film will be the first in the franchise to be developed under the Marvel Studios banner following Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox.
- Release Date
- July 26, 2024
As the script was going through the usual rewrites, and Reynolds was probably reading scenes with everyone who played a part in the film, the news about Robert Downey Jr.’s casting as Doctor Doom was still very much under wraps. Wernick says: “Behind the scenes, we didn’t know about the Doctor Doom. And there’s no way he was going to do both… Ryan gave him the hard press. We wrote scenes, and Downey read the scenes, but what we didn’t know behind the scenes was this Doctor Doom thing.”
The writers also expanded on how the Iron Man cameo would have played out if it had been gone according to the script:
“It was a version of what you saw in the sense that he rejected Wade. He just said he wasn’t a team player or whatever and questioned his team-player abilities. So it was actually pretty close to the scene that you saw. It just had two guys instead of one. And then Jon [Favreau] was, graciously, connected to it from the start. It worked out great. I mean, look, we would’ve loved to have Downey. But, at the same time, I think Marvel had this ace in their hole, which is he’s about to come back in this different character. So,
to have him be Tony Stark?
Knowing that Doctor Doom was coming on the heels of that? It just didn’t make sense.”
Deadpool & Wolverine: An Effective and Subversive Change
Deadpool & Wolverine proved many things for Disney and everyone else involved in the process of mashing together some of the industry’s most successful IPs. The film was possible due to the studio’s risky gamble to fold the raunchiest superhero around into its most profitable franchise. And the result is a film that’s close to making $1 billion at the box office. One of the important questions is how – and the answer may lie in the originality of Reynolds’ approach to the beloved character, something that may not have appealed to critics at first.
We could expand on what Deadpool & Wolverine brings to the table in terms of its ambitious and divisive tone, the gimmicky presence of cameos, and what many consider to be a tiresome practice of breaking the fourth wall. However, nothing is clearer than what the writers confirm could have been included in the movie, more specifically in the scene when Wade gets interviewed. “There was a version of that scene very, very early on that wasn’t written, but was conceived, that had all the Avengers in the room,” Wernick says. “And Wade was rejected and then he dressed all the Avengers down in a way only Deadpool could do.”
He [Deadpool] was going to get mad and basically attack each one of them in a vicious kind of way. He was definitely going to try to pick up Thor’s Hammer. We did have that in there.
Deadpool & Wolverine
is currently playing exclusively in theaters.
