Disney Banned Ryan Reynolds From Using One Animated Classic In Deadpool 3

"Deadpool & Wolverine" was the only Marvel movie released in 2024, which is just as well because it's also the best live-action Marvel movie to come along in a while. It's a film that, among other things, serves as a poignant love letter to nearly 25 years of Fox Marvel movies, including the forgotten or abandoned heroes that were left behind as the Marvel Cinematic Universe dominated the pop culture conversation.

Any concern that the Deadpool character would lose his bite or humor upon being folded into the Disney-owned MCU was ultimately unfounded. The Merc With A Mouth is just as irreverent as ever in "Deadpool & Wolverine," a film that also provides some much-needed meta-commentary on the state of the MCU as you'd hope (like its failure to get a Blade movie off the ground or do anything all that interesting with the multiverse so far). It's the rare case of a movie that had a long wait between sequels and spent many years stuck in early development, yet managed to avoid becoming a disastrous Frankenstein's monster of a film. Sure, production took some time and Ryan Reynolds (the true architect of the "Deadpool" movies) threw a lot of ideas at the wall before settling on the final version, but it was worth it.

Still, it's hard not to think about what could have been. Speaking with Andrew Garfield on Variety's Actors on Actors series, Reynolds talked about one of his earliest pitches to Marvel Studios when it came to the film's plot, which was quickly and thoroughly rejected. "I pitched one where I'm like, 'It's a two-hander with me and the hunter who shot Bambi's mom,'" Reynolds said, much to Garfield's amusement. "Their answer was, 'We don't touch Bambi, Ryan.' Okay, we don't touch Bambi."

According to Reynolds, he spent about a year and a half pitching different ideas for "Deadpool & Wolverine" before Hugh Jackman decided to return to his role as Logan/Wolverine and made it much, much easier to move forward. Among Reynolds' other pitches for the third "Deadpool" film was a narrative inspired by "Rashomon," where we would've watched the same story unfold from the perspectives of both Deadpool and Wolverine before the movie revealed the objective truth. Another was to make a Sundance-style drama without special effects or any conflict, which (as Reynolds tells it) would've included a four-minute long oner of Deadpool going to the bathroom. "Something that just tells the audience, this is raw and vulnerable, and we're going there," he added. Unsurprisingly, Disney and Marvel Studios rejected this one too.

Still, "Deadpool & Wolverine" got away with a lot — within limits. Disney and Marvel had no issues with the film's joke about pegging (which Kevin Feige had to explain to Marvel execs), although they did draw the line at a joke involving Disney itself. Though Reynolds had promised never to utter the line in public, we now know what this forbidden gag entailed thanks to the "Deadpool & Wolverine" script that's been made publicly available. In case you missed it, there's a moment in the screenplay where Deadpool complains that there aren't more Fox Marvel characters that can help him. "Disney is so cheap," he says. "I can barely breathe with all this Mickey Mouse c*** in my throat." Instead, that joke was replaced with another, equally dirty line involving Pinocchio sticking his nose, um, somewhere and then lying like there's no tomorrow.

Lesson learned, Disney: Stay away from Bambi, but Pinocchio? He's fair game.