There’s no way you left a screening of the massive summer hit Deadpool and Wolverine without humming “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC. The perpetually catchy pop song played over the opening credits of Shawn Levy’s new film – and if you saw it, you know what was happening during the sequence. The mercenary Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) admitted that they couldn’t do a Deadpool and Wolverine movie without desecrating the legacy of the ending of Logan. So, they didn’t. Deadpool dug up Wolverine’s corpse, then used his adamantium skeleton to kill a band of TVA agents. It was horrifyingly magnificent.
Leading up to the creation of the opening scene of Deadpool and Wolverine, though, there were a lot of gnarly conversation between Shawn Levy, Ryan Reynolds, and the visual effects artists at Weta over how “dead” Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) should be. For example, Deadpool digs the mutant warrior up because he assumes that his regenerative healing powers will have brought him back to life. And that was factored in, according to a ScreenRant conversation with Weta VFX Supervisor Dan Macarin. After diving into specifics about Deadpool’s mask, and Wolverine’s mask, SR talked to Macarin about Logan’s corpse, and he told them:
The conversations we had with the skeleton were like, 'Well, if we show too much skin, people might think, why doesn't he just come back to life? If his skin is there, then he should be able to heal. He should start coming back and is that what's going to happen in the movie? Are you going to see his eye turn to life or something else?' So originally, after the initial discussions, which started having a really gross zombie prosthetic be pulled out of the grave, they quickly said, 'You know what? Let's just do a silver skeleton and make it all metal adamantium. People will recognize it, they'll get it, it'll be really deteriorated and just raggedy, that'll work.'
And it probably would have. Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton is about as famous as Captain America’s shield, or Iron Man’s gauntlets. But the VFX artists kept going back to the fact that the Zombie Wolverine needed more. This is a corpse, after all, and of course, Ryan Reynolds just couldn't help himself and had to keep pushing for more. That ultimately led to the monstrosity that we see in the opening sequence of Deadpool and Wolverine. According to Macarin:
As the sequence played on, people were watching it, and Ryan was like, 'You know what? I really want to desecrate Jackman's corpse. We need to make this the next level. I want to make it funnier, and the skin is funny.'
He was right. The shreds of skin on the zombie helped to make the opening scene that much more insane, particularly with the inclusion of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” and Deadpool dancing. We don’t have that sequence to share yet, as Deadpool and Wolverine hasn’t made its way to the Disney+ streaming service. But we have the next best thing.
I’ll never hear that and not think of Deadpool dancing with Wolverine’s corpse. Thank you for that, Ryan Reynolds. If you need an Marvel fix, you might have to head back to theaters, as that’s the only upcoming Marvel movie hitting theaters this year. Fans of the MCU will have the TV series Agatha All Along to look forward to in September, but then it’s aa break until Anthony Mackie starts throwing around his new shield, and facing off against a Red Hulk, in February’s Captain America: Brave New World. Hopefully, less corpses in that one.
