Kevin Feige spoke to Next Best Picture about Deadpool & Wolverine and the joys of being able to curse.
Feige began with how he met Hugh Jackman in the early part of his career and then reuniting at the later part of their careers, with his Wolverine now in a Marvel film.
“It's amazing. It's something I hadn't dreamed about, frankly. I thought, when we had become Marvel Studios, we had left the X-Men behind. We didn't have the rights. We couldn't incorporate them into the MCU. So I would watch them all as a fan, but didn't have anything to do with them,” the Marvel chief began.
Marvel president Kevin Feige gets emotional over the X-Men
“So when this happened, it felt extremely emotional. Primarily, it was emotional to get access to all the characters back. And suddenly there aren't a whole subset of important historic comics that we couldn't translate into features,” he continued.
He told the story of how Jackman called Ryan Reynolds, calling it “the perfect moment at the perfect time” for him to join “and solidify what this movie would become.”
“It took me back to my early days in the business of being very thankful. I'm still just thankful to be here and to be around. But in Toronto, for the first X-Men movie where I was a low man on the producer totem pole, where Hugh was just excited to have a gig and give something a shot. And now to meet again at very different points in our careers has been wonderful. And I'm sure everybody will say to you: Hugh's the same. I'm not. I'm a colossal jerk now. You almost can't take it. He is so nice and kind; same guy he was then,” Feige continued.
By the way, he had to clarify — twice — that he was joking.
The interviewer also asked the Marvel boss about what it would have been like if this movie had been released two or three years after Deadpool 2 (2018) instead of now when Marvel Studios needed a shot in the arm. But with that comes Wade Wilson/Deadpool criticizing the faults and blunders that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made.
In the spirit of Deadpool, you can take a joke.
Feige replied, “The timing is always everything, right? In all fictional narratives, it exists within the time that it was created. And we actually couldn't have done Deadpool any earlier because of the Fox acquisition and the timing with all of that. It's the line in the first 37 minutes of the movie that Deadpool says and people say, ‘Ooh, you let him say that?' You know who Deadpool makes fun of all the time? Ryan Reynolds. All the time. So why would we not let them poke fun at us?”
“That would not be in the spirit of Deadpool or in the spirit of the way we want to make that movie. I also would say, ‘Wait until you see the rest of the movie,'” he added.
The Marvel boss acknowledges the lift that the movie is going to give the studio and said, “But it is a huge shot in the arm to get. It's a great movie. And great movies solve almost everything. So having a great movie right now is wonderful.”
“And Shawn and Hugh and Ryan have made a great movie. Having access to those characters now in the MCU 25 years into my time at Marvel, 15 years and 34 films into the MCU, to now have access to all of the X-Men and all of the Fantastic Four and Daredevil and all the characters that had previously been in other people's hands is a huge rush and a huge shot in the arm to be able to chart out our long-term storytelling.”
That huge shot in the arm also comes with a different MPAA rating. Deadpool & Wolverine is the first R-rated MCU film. Does this open doors to telling stories of those ilk?
There's something therapeutic about it…
“I'm just so excited that I can say “f**k” now. So excited. I could never do it before,” Feige replied almost giddily.
However, he did reply a little more seriously that it's less about saying, “Hey, everybody can say the F word now.”
“It's about staying true to the tone of what the character is. And that's what Deadpool is. And that's what Ryan had done wonderfully without us in the first two Deadpool films,” he added.
“And when you look at characters like Blade that we've been working on for a very long time to get right — all those movies were R. So being able to tell the types of stories — not being held back in any way from doing justice to a character. And we've never felt in any way that we've been hamstrung or held back from telling the best stories possible at Marvel Studios with Disney,” the producer clarified.
How does the head of the premiere superhero film studio balance storytelling when it comes to resurrecting characters who have had heroic and dramatic deaths the way Logan/Wolverine did in the 2017 James Mangold film? On the one hand, in the fictional universe no character stays dead forever. Where is the balance between giving in to fan service and sticking to one's guns about finally closing a chapter?
In the business of resurrection
For Feige, he said it's about looking to the comics “because characters have come and gone all the time in the comics.”
“Thank goodness. I remember Superman died when I was a teenager and I bought all those books and all the different versions of those cool covers. Imagine if he had stayed dead? That'd be horrible. That'd be depressing,” he stated.
“So of course, they're going to come back. I also remember Marvel saying two people we're never bringing back: Uncle Ben and Bucky Barnes. And then Ed Brubaker had a great way to bring back Bucky Barnes and he became the Winter Soldier. And it was the greatest thing ever. So it's all about how you do it,” the Marvel chief noted.
“And I would argue the Winter Soldier completely honors the origins of Bucky and the loss of Bucky and what that meant to Cap. And they did a great job of it. In our movie, we go out of our way to honor and acknowledge and solidify the history of Logan and what happened in that movie and not undo that in any way. And that's what's fun about these stories is we get to keep telling them and evolving them as they have over 85 years in the comics,” he explained.
Early success?
The first reactions to the movie are out and the consensus of most people echoes the phrase used in this interview: a shot in the arm. It's also been described as a love letter to superhero movies — and in particular, Fox's Marvel era.
The New York Times' Alissa Wilkinson wrote, “It is a film about how anything that was ever successful in Hollywood is made to repeat that same song and dance endlessly… Deadpool & Wolverine devilishly plays on this, of course. It is watchable because it’s self-reflective.”
For the most part, the reviews mention the “raunchy self-referential humor” that Deadpool is known for — and something Reynolds has made bank on all these years — and how it worked, as expected.
Deadpool & Wolverine's early success may be expected, but it definitely is refreshing for Marvel Studios. Its box office projections have steadily gone higher approaching the premiere date. Analysts previously forecasted an already record-breaking $160 million to $170 million domestic opening. This is already much higher than the highest earning R-rated film — the first Deadpool movie.
This kind of success has been missing in the MCU for a while now. The last few films have underperformed at the box office and if the projections prove right, Deadpool & Wolverine are set to deliver a record-breaking, eye-watering $360 million worldwide debut.
So maybe Feige should just curse whenever he needs to… just because he can now.
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