Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds talk about the script-writing process for Deadpool & Wolverine and how the film almost didn’t happen.

Deadpool & Wolverine was a smash hit for Marvel, who seemed to be on a downward turn at the time. It broke box-office records. Fans hadn’t been this excited about an MCU film in years. This is in large part due to an excellent script. However, the journey of writing that script was troubled. The film was almost shelved during pre-production, as Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds told IndieWire.

The film might seem like it’s so lively that it wrote itself, but this is far from the truth. According to Levy, “There’s this presumption, because the movie has a bouncy, naturalistic flow to it that, ‘Oh, we’re just finding it through improvisation, and we’re trying stuff out on set.’ And certainly, there’s a little bit of that, but we refuse to go into production without a script that is honestly 95 percent reflective of the movie that everyone’s seen, and it really was the outgrowth of a long, long writing process.”

And going into the movie, we felt we had a lot to prove to Marvel and Disney.

Reynolds added, “And going into the movie, we felt we had a lot to prove to Marvel and Disney. It’s the first big Fox property, after Disney bought the studio, to be R-rated. We had to write a movie that was a four-quadrant R-rated movie. That’s a hard thing to do. In order to do that, I’m not a big poetry person, but Keats talks about all the stitching and unstitching you do to make it feel like a moment’s thought. And that’s what is.”

Putting a film like this together was no easy feat. The film spent a long time in development, and when Deadpool & Wolverine finally got off the ground, writing the script proved quite a challenge. “We’ve spent seven months trying to come up with the story, because the jokes are the least of our worries,” Levy said.

Reynolds continued, “We just write a drama with the stakes that a drama would have. We’ll work with comedy later, just need that narrative and that backbone to go from that canvas. And it’s counterintuitive, because everyone’s expecting us to find different ways to be subversive in comedy. And that’s later, that’s easier, once we have the emotional side of it, then you do the task of building in the comedy, which is so difficult to do and to get right, especially in the writing, because you have to write and rewrite and rewrite, and then you have to get on set and listen to the movie and see what it’s telling you, because it’s yelling at you. And then I’m in a Deadpool suit. He’s in a parka, in the winter, we got our laptop.”

How Deadpool & Wolverine Almost Died

It got to the point that the pair almost gave up on the film. “This almost didn’t happen, because finding the Venn diagram overlap between a movie that felt authentic to Deadpool, who is an earthbound anti-hero, raw and unvarnished storytelling, pretty gritty. And then you have the MCU, which is often shiny and galactic stakes. And we tried and tried, and we were on the cusp of failure. And I actually intended to tell Marvel and Disney, ‘You know what, guys, it’s not happening. Let’s put it to the side. We’ll punt.’”

But then Hugh Jackman came to save the day. “We had that Zoom that day, and you can’t make this up. Hugh pulled over on the side of the road and called,” Reynolds said. “I’ve known Hugh. We’ve been best buddies for 16, 17 years. I picked it up, and he said, it was like this gut thing: He wanted to come back as Wolverine. Ironically, my first pitch to Kevin Feige five years before was a Deadpool and Wolverine movie, a Rashomon story. So much of these movies are timing. He had just finished Logan, and it was a beautiful masterpiece of a movie and a screenplay. He didn’t feel like it was right. And I respected that. But then five years later, it felt like the world is speaking to us in a weird way, right? We should maybe listen.”

Deadpool & Wolverine is streaming on Disney+.