Josh Brolin brought Marvel's Cable to life in Deadpool 2 and while he looked amazing, some brand new concept art reveals how the character could have looked. Jerad S.Marantz was a concept artist on Deadpool 2 and he's recently been filing Instagram with some of the pre-production work that he did, including a different design for Cable's iconic metal arm. Check it out.
Jarad Marantz talks about how this arm was originally designed, based on the idea that Cable had embedded this prosthetic underneath the tech from the techno-organic virus that the character suffers from. The fact that Cable is part machine and part man is due to this virus, and it would have cost him the use of his arm without the use of this prosthetic. Whether or not that's technically what's happening with Cable's arm in Deadpool 2 is never specifically stated, but it's a pretty cool idea that we can assume is the case unless we hear otherwise in the future.
We get multiple angles of the metal arm here, and it looks pretty cool. A lot of fine detail that makes him look like he's part Terminator, which, he sort of is. The final design that we got in Deadpool 2 isn't all that different, with what at least appear to be a few cosmetic differences. Since Jarad Marantz says that these ideas were worked on with the costume designer, and one assumes the folks in charge of the film's digital effects, the changes were likely due to finding something that was easy to create that worked for everybody involved. Here's a partial shot of the final version.
It's always interesting to see the evolution of different ideas as they eventually culminate in what ends up on screen. Things like costume design, or in this case, arm design, are meant to tell you a lot about a character without having to spend screen time explaining things. In this case, there might be details about a character in this design that aren't ever important, but in the era of massive franchise filmmaking, these sorts of things need to be dealt with at the beginning so that, if and when, issues like the techno-organic virus become important later on, the work was done at the beginning and nobody needs to retcon anything.
We know we will be seeing Cable again, as there is an X-Force movie planned for sometime in the not too distant future. Perhaps we'll learn more about the ways Cable has modified himself to deal with his affliction at that time.
