One of the biggest questions after Disney purchased 21st Century Fox was just what was happening with Deadpool. The Ryan Reynolds' starring action franchise had been the bright spot in Fox's Marvel properties, but it was also the least Disney. Bringing characters like the X-Men into the MCU looked to be comparatively easy compared to figuring out where Deadpool might fit.
However, it looks like progress is being made in that regard. This week Ryan Reynolds appeared on Live with Kelly and Ryan and confirmed that work on the next Deadpool movie is underway with the new team at Marvel Studios. Reynolds told them...
Yeah we’re working on it right now with the whole team. We’re over at Marvel [Studios] now, which is like the big leagues all of a sudden. It’s kinda crazy. So yeah, we’re working on it.
We'd seen a couple of months ago that Ryan Reynolds had visited Marvel, and one certainly assumed that Deadpool was a topic of conversation, but this is the first confirmation that something is moving forward under the new management.
From early on Disney, everybody, including CEO Bob Iger, had promised that Disney would take a "if it's not broke, don't fix it" approach to Deadpool and that the character would continue forward more or less as he had existed previously.
Of course, while we know now that something is happening with Deadpool, we still don't know what it is. Originally, the plan at Fox had been to move forward with an X-Force movie rather than a Deadpool 3. Disney could go with either project, or something completely different.
We could even get a "rebooted" Deadpool. Even though Ryan Reynolds will obviously still play the lead role, it doesn't mean everything else about the series won't change. It probably largely depends on how Deadpool will fit into the MCU, assuming he does at all. It's possible, considering the movies' R-rated nature, that Deadpool could be kept separate so as not to sully the family friendly nature of the larger Marvel universe.
The one benefit of not including Deadpool in the MCU is that we might get a new movie sooner that way. If Deadpool is being introduced into the MCU, it likely won't happen until sometime after the current slate of projects are done, which are currently scheduled into early 2022. It also probably won't happen until the rest of the X-Men are introduced into the universe. If the Deadpool movie is a standalone thing, then it could be inserted in the current slate without disrupting anything.
Still, however it's all done, more Deadpool is a good thing and it's great to know that we're getting some forward progression. We can be confident that this really will happen, even if we still have no idea when we might see it.
