SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Deadpool. If you haven’t had a chance to see the film yet, and don’t wish for any part of it to be ruined, please click away to one of our other wonderful articles!
While both certainly pop culture figures, Deadpool and Ferris Bueller don’t exactly share a lot in common. One is a psychopathic, motor-mouth mercenary, and the other is a lazy high school student who gets his kicks tricking his parents and touring around Chicago. One key thing that they do share in common, however, is that both are fictional characters with the ability to break the fourth wall – and it was this important piece of key information that led to the birth of one of the funniest comic book movie post-credits sequences that we’ve had the pleasure of seeing.
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of chatting with screenwriters/producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick about all things Deadpool, and it was while diving into spoiler territory that the two men discussed the initial inspiration for the film’s special post-credits sequence. Essentially, the idea came from the aforementioned connection between The Merc With The Mouth and the man responsible for the best day off ever, and when the idea struck, it struck like lightning. As Reese explained,
Ferris Bueller is obviously famous for many things, one of them is breaking the fourth wall, so it just kind of clicked in my head, like, ‘What if Deadpool is in the robe, and he’s walking down the hallway.’ We wrote it, and everyone was like, ‘My God, this is it.’ Because we had all these grand plans for codas and cameos and so on and so forth, and we were like, this is it.
Perhaps even more interesting than the inception of the Deadpool post-credits scene, however, is the fact that Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick found that the extra ending actually helped people finally understand what it was exactly that they were trying to create with their screenplay. In fact, Wernick told me the story of one particular executive who had an authentic "A ha!" moment after reading the very end of the script:
What’s interesting is it was that moment that unlocked the movie for a lot of people. One of the execs at Fox, after reading the Ferris Bueller coda was like, ‘This movie is Ferris Bueller meets Natural Born Killers.’ And that’s what this movie is. In a way, she’s right. That’s exactly what it is. So it was just a fun nod to one of our favorite movies growing up.
As you probably could have guessed, the post-credits scene for Deadpool has not yet been officially released online by 20th Century Fox, but at the very least you can enjoy the classic coda from John Hughes’ 1986 classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:
What did you think about Deadpool’s post-credits scene? Did you find it funny, or do you wish that there was more room in the budget for some kind of big Deadpool 2 tease? How quickly did you catch that it was created as a reference to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Hit the comments below with your thoughts!
