Marvel's Kevin Feige Had One Condition for Hugh Jackman to Return in Deadpool & Wolverine
"'Forget it. It's never going to happen,'" the Marvel boss once said of Jackman's potential Wolverine return.
Kevin Feige would prefer yellow spandex. More than 20 years after James Marsden's black leather-clad Cyclops joked about Wolverine's classic costume in 2000's X-Men, Hugh Jackman will wear the comic-accurate blue and yellow suit from the comics in Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine. Feige, who was an associate producer on the Fox-made Marvel adaptation that introduced Jackman as the adamantium-clawed mutant, had that one condition for bringing Logan into his Marvel Cinematic Universe alongside Ryan Reynolds' Merc with a Mouth.
"He said, 'Yes, but he wears the yellow. Can he finally wear the yellow?'" Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy told a 1,000-seat theater while promoting the Marvel Studios movie with Reynolds and Jackman in Shanghai, China. "And we began."
Reynolds, who also produced and co-wrote the script with Levy and returning Deadpool and Deadpool 2 scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, explained that he and Levy were ready to put a pin in Deadpool 3 after Marvel turned down a series of pitches. (Rejected ideas included a Rashomon-style story and a no-budget road trip movie with Karan Soni's cab driver Dopinder and no special effects.)
Disney's 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox was "maybe not the best investment," Reynolds quipped, but it allowed the Deadpool character to cross over into the MCU. The deal happened after Jackman retired the Wolverine role with 2017's Logan, and it looked like Reynolds' efforts to make a Deadpool/Wolverine movie — an idea that dates back to 2016 — was never going to happen. (It didn't help that Feige said those exact words.) But then a serendipitous phone call changed everything.
"I had met Kevin Feige six years ago to discuss this, and the first thing I said to him, 'I just want to make Wolverine and Deadpool together. I just want these two together on screen.' At the time, Kevin said, 'Forget it. It's never going to happen,'" Reynolds recalled. "And I said, 'Okay, that's fine.' As we marched inexorably forward, Shawn and I were coming up with different pitches and different ideas, and we pitched Marvel everything you could imagine — little movies, big movies, anything — and it wasn't working out."
He continued, "And then one day, we were on our last pitch. We were about to say to Kevin Feige, 'I think we're going to walk away and we'll come back later, maybe in a couple years, when we have a better sense of things.' And Hugh happened to call me." Jackman told Reynolds that, if it wasn't too late, he wanted to come back and do Deadpool 3.
"Shawn and I just pivoted in the middle of our pitch to Kevin and said, 'Look, this thing just happened. It seems kind of miraculous. Hugh called me, what do you say?'" Reynolds said. "And for some reason, Kevin immediately said yes." Levy then noted it was with that one condition: Jackman's Wolverine wears yellow.
Reynolds and Jackman star alongside returning Deadpool cast members Morena Baccarin, Leslie Uggams, Karan Soni, Rob Delaney, Brianna Hildebrand, Shioli Kutsuna, and Stefan Kapičić, with Succession star Matthew Macfadyen joining the MCU as TVA Agent Paradox and The Crown's Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova. Marvel Studios' R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine opens only in theaters July 26th.
