It’s been a pretty troubling week for the Merc with a Mouth. Though his upcoming sequel, Deadpool 2, has long been considered to be a cinematic slam dunk, fans were thrown for a loop recently when reactions from early test screenings began to emerge. To say that they were underwhelming would be an understatement, with many people taking to Twitter to air their not so nice thoughts on it.
Going one step further, former IGN editor Jeremy Conrad then published a pretty damning report, detailing all of the sequel’s missteps and painting a worrying picture of what’s to come. And while it’s always best to take this kind of stuff with a grain of salt – test screenings are, after all, designed to identify a film’s problems before release and fix them – fans are still feeling anxious, and understandably so.
Here to assure us that there’s nothing to worry about though is Brianna Hildebrand, who plays Negasonic Teenage Warhead. Speaking with Screen Geek this weekend, she told the outlet that everything’s fine and there’s no cause for concern.
“No, it was nothing that had gone wrong. I think it’s a common misconception too – that people think that reshoots are to fix things that people didn’t like. A lot of the time, reshoots are to add more of the things that people loved. [Filmmakers] watch their films again and are like “better fix that”. I don’t know how much I can say about that. Usually films hate it when you talk about their reshoots – solely because people think that it’s because the film was bad for the test audience – but it was all good.”
While it’s nice to hear Hildebrand’s comments, we’re still a bit skeptical. I mean, she stars in the movie, so of course she’s going to try and downplay any negative rumors surrounding it. And at this point, enough people have corroborated those reports that we’re inclined to believe, at the very least, certain parts of Deadpool 2 haven’t gone over very well with test audiences. It may not be a total disaster like some are making it out to be, but we imagine that the ongoing reshoots are being done to address issues that stemmed from early screenings – in addition to adding more Cable and Domino.
Fox hasn’t made any official statement on the matter just yet, though, and until they do, all of this remains filed firmly in the rumor/speculation cabinet. After all, everything we’ve seen from Deadpool 2 so far looks great and we’d be shocked if the studio dropped the ball on one of their most popular properties. True, comedy sequels are notoriously tricky to get right, but we’ll continue to remain cautiously optimistic that director David Leitch and co. have succeeded here.