With the enormous success of Deadpool's first feature film, it may be easy to forget his very first live-action apperance in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Aside from shoddy special effects, a lacklustre story and far too many minor characters, the film introduced us to Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool, who was a far cry from his comic book counterpart at the time. The film saw Deadpool experimented on by William Stryker, ending up as a disfigured mess with his mouth sewn shut and various abilities culled from other mutants. In a recent interview with CinemaBlend, director Gavin Hood admitted that it wasn't the version he or the audience wanted.
“I think the character works so well now because the character is allowed to be who the character really is, unencumbered by, you know, PG-13 requirements and a great deal of marketing debate,” Gavin Hood told Cinemablend. “Credit to the filmmakers and to Ryan, that they took control of their character and got on and let Ryan do the film. Deadpool is a motor mouth, foul mouth character, and it’s very difficult with these big movies to... When you have to work within certain parameters that are set by…” The interviewer asked “Studio heads?” to which he replied “Thank you. Thank you.”
Hood explained that it was the writer's strike and studio interference that prevented the film from being the classic Wolverine story that was originally planned. “You know, when [Reynolds] did the little cameo bit in X-Men Origins - Wolverine, it was exactly what we’ve been talking about. It was the studio attempting to plug in a few characters and test the waters. But now he gets to make his own movie and he did it with great courage and with the full force of his personality, so he deserves every success."
While it took 7 years to finally get Deadpool back on the big screen, Hood believed that Fox made the right choice in forgoing the PG-13 rating in favour of a hard R. “They had to make it R rated, but can you imagine if they were trying for PG-13? I just don’t think it would have worked. Which is not to say that other films shouldn’t be PG-13. Of course you want that huge audience. But you’ve got to be very careful that you’re not torturing the material to fit a particular marketing strategy, and that’s what they didn’t do with Deadpool. They just made the film the way it needed to be made, I think.”
With Deadpool's current worldwide gross of $754,827,568, it's hard to argue to the contrary!