It was fairly obvious from Deadpool & Wolverine's trailers that the X-Men were dead in Logan's reality and, with rumours swirling about the team appearing, many of us hoped to see an Old Man Logan-style death scene.
Ultimately, we didn't get that and the X-Men were nowhere to be seen (likely meaning their return is being saved for Avengers: Doomsday and/or Avengers: Secret Wars).
Talking to Collider, Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy confirmed showing the team's demise rather than just telling us about it was a possibility. "Yeah, we talked about it," he said. "We ended up doing it with a soundscape and with sound design. We did talk about it."
"But ultimately, it felt like the specifics of those characters' deaths don't matter to this story as much as the way they haunt Logan. And so we chose to keep the focus on him."
Star Ryan Reynolds, who also helped write the movie, added: "It's a little bit what you don't see is more haunting than what you do see. Maybe I'm wrong, Shawn. And I felt like it would cheapen it if you're seeing, you know, all these people, these kids, these grown-ups. The biggest win, I think, for us with the Wolverine character was two things."
He'd go on to say, "Now, I love that we kind of use the suit as a hair shirt, you know, as a kind of penance that he's wearing this thing that is like a, you know, a punishment that covers this body."
Reynolds also revealed that Logan losing control and murdering the people he mentions was an idea rooted in the comics. "Really kind of scratching that itch of Wolverine, you know, like the idea that the Berserker rage takes over, he kills and he can be to a certain degree, indiscriminate about that killing. And that is a big part of the shame," the actor explained.
"Touching on some of that Berserker rage, which is genuinely in the canon of Wolverine and the comics, and getting to sort of acknowledge that he didn't just kill the bad people when he lost it... is pretty damn powerful and not necessarily something you want to see. You want to feel it."
As interesting as it might have been to see the death of the X-Men - and exactly what Wolverine did to disgrace himself and the team's legacy - Levy and Reynolds are right that not showing it was ultimately far more powerful.
The way Hugh Jackman plays those emotional scenes is ultimately going to leave a lasting impression; a gory 60-second sequence, however, might just fade into the background in a movie so full of action.
Deadpool & Wolverine is now playing in theaters.