Deadpool Writers Used A Smart Trick To Cut The First Movie's Budget

I'm not the biggest fan of the "Deadpool" movies. They're less the advertised superhero parodies and more straight-up action-comedy superhero films, fourth-wall-breaking or not. (Granted, the same could be said of "Deadpool" comics.) They have their moments where they don't just play the genre beats, though, and the climax of the first "Deadpool" movie has two such moments. 

One is when Wade (Ryan Reynolds) executes his nemesis Ajax (Ed Skrein), disregarding Colossus' (Stefan Kapičić) speech about the rare moments one gets to be a hero. Before that is a classic explosive fight of good vs. evil, complete with a damsel in distress (Wade's gal Vanessa, as played by Morena Baccarin) hanging in the balance. The fight isn't as explosive as it could've been though, since Deadpool forgets his duffle bag full of guns in the taxi that he, Colossus, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) took to the showdown.

As the trio make their slow-motion, "Wild Bunch" style march to battle scored to DMX's "X Gon' Give It To Ya," Negasonic interrupts and asks Deadpool where his guns are. Deadpool calling the departing taxi driver Dopinder (Karan Soni) to turn around just makes him crash. Stuck on voicemail, Deadpool decides they have to do without the guns.

Deadpool bringing a bag full of guns and losing it reinforces how he's not a typical superhero; he's cheerfully bloodthirsty and a f**k-up. The way Deadpool's eyes go wide when he realizes Negasonic Teenage Warhead is right, the cartoony "whoosh" sound effect as he turns his head around in panic, the image of him in full costume pacing around with his phone — it's all a well made comedy beat.

This wasn't just "Deadpool" putting comedy before action, though. The movie literally didn't have the money for all those guns.

As "Deadpool" co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick told IndieWire back in 2016, 20th Century Fox cut the movie's budget by several million dollars when giving it the green light. So, the screenwriters (a.k.a. "The Real Heroes Here") needed to slice out some expensive chunks of the script. They disagreed about the exact numbers; Wernick said they had to cut the script from $58 million to $50 million, Reese said it was $64 million to $59 million. For what it's worth, the final "Deadpool" budget has been independently reported at $58 million, still far below most Marvel movies.

Reese revealed that one of the jettisoned sequences was a large gunfight in the third act. So, "necessity being the mother of invention," they decided to turn that scene's exclusion into a joke about how the movie wouldn't have its huge planned gunfight. (Deadpool mostly sticks with his swords instead.)

That's not the only budget-mandated change in "Deadpool" that turned out for the better. Director Tim Miller also didn't want the third act to be a big gun fight, as he told Empire in 2015 ahead of the movie's release: "I wanted to see more superhero stuff."

The "Deadpool" script originally included the character Garrison Kane, but the visual effects for his bionic arms were deemed too expensive a special effect. Negasonic Teenage Warhead showed up on a list of replacement mutants given to Miller; he liked her name, so they went with her. The film reimagined her psychic powers from the comics into generating propulsive energy. Another character considered as Colossus' foil was Sam Guthrie/Cannonball, but Miller preferred a "deadpan goth" over a "stupid hick." Cannonball's powers are more visually dynamic and action-oriented though, so they mixed the best of both characters into one.