Deadpool Director Tim Miller Explains How Fox Nearly Cut One Crucial Joke From The First Deadpool Film
Emily Baldwin Deadpool is currently one of the most successful R-rated franchises and one of the most successful superhero franchises as well, as buzz for its third installment is through the roof and it is still 2 years away!
However, as wildly successful as the franchise is right now giving it almost unlimited creative power, its beginnings were not that easy. For the longest time, Deadpool was under constant scrutiny from executives at Fox studios who owned the rights to the character. The reason for the scrutiny was obviously the controversial nature of the character.
The first Deadpool film underwent an incredibly long development process with many creatives hopping on board and leaving the film. At one point the film was almost scrapped until one of the sequences from the film leaked online and received such positive reviews that the studio was compelled to make the film. Tim Miller took the director’s chair with Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick taking on writing and the film began production.
Today, Tim Miller has revealed that even then Fox did their best to try and take creative control of the film, because of which one epic joke almost didn’t make it into the film. The joke was when Deadpool kills several henchmen on a bridge, smells his gun smoke, and says, “I’m touching myself tonight.”
Tim Miller recalled how Fox tried to cut out the joke while speaking on the VFX Artists React series. He said:
“That was one of the five jokes that the old Fox regime said, ‘Well this is not funny, it must be removed from the script.’ When it brought the f—king house down at Comic-Con, I was like, ‘Yes, I told you!’”
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The Deadpool trailer (with the joke included) was received with wildly positive reviews at Comic-Con and that left Fox no choice but to give complete creative control to Tim, Rhet, Paul, and Ryan Reynolds himself. Deadpool went on to become the highest-earning R-Rated film for a while, spawning a sequel and now a threequel which will be coming out in September of 2024 and will feature the return of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
