It’s a pretty safe statement to say that people loved Deadpool & Wolverine. It ended 2024 as the highest-grossing live-action movie of the year, both domestically and worldwide, grossing well over $1 billion. Fans loved all the returning superhero characters from the various pre-MCU Marvel movies, but there was one character who was conspicuous by his absence, and Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld thinks the new movie made a big mistake leaving him out.
In addition to all the cameos and supporting characters who appeared in Deadpool & Wolverine, most of the cast of the two previous Deadpool films appeared, though in fairly small roles. However, Rob Liefeld thinks that one character from Deadpool 2 should have also been in the new film, as Josh Brolin’s Cable was nowhere to be found. In a response on Twitter to the recent news of Brolin possibly joining the DCU, Liefled posted…
Shouldn’t have blocked him from Deadpool & Wolverine. All time boner move.
While I think “all-time” might be a bit of an overstatement, Deadpool & Wolverine did just fine as it was, I have to agree with Liefeld that leaving Josh Brolin out was a significant misstep. Cable was an excellent addition to Deadpool 2 and beyond the fact that Deadpool makes a brief reference to screwing with time travel in the new film, events from second movie are barely addressed.
It’s not like bringing Cable back would have been out of place. Every other superhero you can shake a comic book at was in the movie, even some like Channing Tatum's Gambit whose movie never came to fruition.
It didn’t even need to be the same version of Cable that we saw in Deadpool 2, Brolin could have easily played some alternate version of the character that Deadpool and Wolverine came across while wandering the TVA wasteland, just like the other big cameos. It could have been a small role or a brief appearance if Brolin was too busy to do anything more significant.
It would be one thing if Marvel Studios decided that Deadpool was the only character from the X-Men universe who would be seen in the MCU. After all, we can be pretty sure that the official MCU X-Men, whenever they debut in upcoming Marvel movies, will be played by other actors. But of course, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was in the movie, and its title. And even Kelsey Grammar’s Beast made an appearance in The Marvels post-credits scene.
Maybe it was the fact that Brolin is already part of the MCU as Thanos. Of course Thanos is dead, and the fact that Brolin played both roles was already joked about in Deadpool 2 and could have been the source of even more fun in the new film.
Considering how long it took to make Deadpool & Wolverine happen and all the work that went into getting that cast together, leaving Josh Brolin out does feel like a significant lost opportunity.
