It was way back in 2013 when Kick-Ass 2 director Jeff Wadlow was hired to write and helm an X-Force movie for 20th Century Fox. The project started gaining some traction and was one which many fans started getting excited about.
Ultimately, it fell apart, and after Deadpool test footage was leaked online, the Merc with the Mouth got to take centre stage in his own 2016 movie.
Wadlow has now elaborated on his plans for X-Force, revealing he wanted to do right by Deadpool. "I was lucky enough to write an X-Force script for Fox before the original Deadpool film was made," the filmmaker started. "He'd been in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and, as a comic book fan, I knew that was a travesty. That was a total abomination. I wanted to get it right."
As for his approach to the story, Wadlow added, "My pitch for the movie was, 'If X-Men is about mutants that get to go to private school, what about the mutants that get to go to public school?'"
"I wrote this movie that was very much inspired by the original X-Men run back in the '90s," he continued. "I introduced Cable as this dark mentor for our characters. It was definitely about the young mutants formerly known as the New Mutants. In my movie, it was Cannonball, Boom-Boom, I aged Domino down...Rictor was there. Feral was there."
"I put them on this road movie. I modelled it after Red Dawn. They were on the run in West Texas," Wadlow added.
As for how Wade Wilson was going to factor into the story, he explains, "I wanted this antagonist chasing them the whole time. Deadpool was introduced as a villain in the original X-Force run, so I had our main villain hire a mercenary to hire this group of ragtag villains down and the mercenary hired was Deadpool. He was in motorcycle leathers with this red ballistic face mask. I made it very clear he was going to look just like he did in the comic books."
"I wanted Ryan [Reynolds] to play the part...I got in touch with Ryan, got him the script and he loved it. He said it was, like, a grand cameo for Deadpool. It was a supporting part. I played him as an antagonist but, ultimately, they turned him in the end."
It sounds like a movie with potential. Instead, Deadpool 2 eventually introduced X-Force, albeit in a light-hearted way which divided opinions. However, it's thought that the plan was for the proper team to assemble either in the original Deadpool 3 (now Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine) or an eventual spin-off.
Back in 2020, Wadlow told us that he had a "three-movie" arc in mind which "took X-Force from what it was in the 90s with Rob Liefeld with a band of kids fighting for what they believe in, and then by the third film, the group would have grown and changed and lost and picked up some new members, and basically turned into Rick Remender's version of the X-Force in the early 2000s."
Hear more from the filmmaker in the player below.