This summer, Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool is making his debut in the MCU, and he’s bringing Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine along with him. At the helm is director Shawn Levy, who not only has a long history with Jackman but apparently also almost brushed with his iconic character’s claws many years back.
Over a decade before Levy directed the third Deadpool movie, he first worked with Hugh Jackman on the sci-fi action flick, Real Steel. In his words:
When we were making Real Steel, Hugh was looking to do The Wolverine, and he asked me if I wanted to do it. And like a moron, I said, ‘No.’ Because I was thinking at that time, ‘Well, it’s your fifth time playing the character, I’m doing original films et cetera’. And I regretted it deeply for years. And so, when the opportunity came around again, thank God I was older and wiser enough to jump at the opportunity.
While speaking to Empire, Shawn Levy revealed that he was actually asked to make what would become 2013’s The Wolverine by Hugh Jackman himself. The movie was instead helmed by James Mangold, who would also cap off the X-Man’s journey with 2017’s Logan. As Levy shared, when he was asked, he wasn’t interested in doing a sequel and passed on the project. In the years to come, he realized that he “deeply” regretted not taking the job.
Cut to Shawn Levy being on the set of The Adam Project with his lead, Ryan Reynolds. During the shoot of the Netflix action movie, the Deadpool actor asked him if he’d be interested in taking on Deadpool 3. As Levy recalls, Reynolds added to the request that he figured he was “gonna say no,” but he decided he was going to do his best to talk him into it. However, this time around the director wasn’t going to pass on the opportunity to helm an upcoming Marvel movie. As Levy recalled:
And my response was, ‘I’m not gonna fucking say no, are you kidding? It’s a hard and immediate yes, sir!’
When Levy signed on to Deadpool 3, Hugh Jackman reportedly wasn’t part of the movie yet, but once he was, it served as the perfect time for the director to finally make a Wolverine movie as well.
You can check out their work together in the latest trailer for Deadpool and Wolverine below:
Deadpool and Wolverine — which is the next Marvel movie to hit theaters and the only one coming out on the 2024 movie schedule — will place Wade Wilson on another mission alongside Wolverine (who is from another multiverse than the X-Men version). It will also see Hugh Jackman wear the Marvel character’s iconic yellow suit for the first time – which funny enough, was almost done for The Wolverine. Overall, we expect tons of fun banter between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as they team up, as well as lots of fun Marvel cameos.
You can look forward to Shawn Levy’s Deadpool and Wolverine coming to theaters on July 26.