Answering the prayers of Marvel fans everywhere, Deadpool 3 is now officially filming. On May 23, the Merc with the Mouth’s first MCU outing started going before cameras, marking Ryan Reynolds’ third solo film as Wade Wilson. Although, of course, his history with the character dates back even further than 2016’s Deadpool, as his X-Men origins actually came in, uh, 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
That widely panned offering saw him share the screen with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine for the first time, a team-up that’s now finally happening again all these years later. It’s rather eerie, then, that Deadpool 3 is beginning its production at a time of upheaval in Hollywood… just as was the case when Origins was shooting way back when.
Twitter user @kickassvargas went viral for pointing out that it’s “very poetic that the second time Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are in production together as these characters is once again taking place during a Writers’ Strike.”
This is naturally setting alarm bells ringing, then, as folks fear we’ve got another stinker like Origins on our hands. While it’s true that the rulers of the current Writers Guild of America strike mean Reynolds can’t update the script as he goes along, like he did on the first two films, Deadpool 3 should manage to scrape by mostly unscathed as he already completed the script alongside director Shawn Levy and co-writer Zeb Wells prior to the strike taking effect.
And therein lies the real reason hardcore Marvel followers should perhaps be concerned about how the threequel will ultimately be perceived. It just so happens that the aforementioned Wells is the writer of Marvel Comics’ current Amazing Spider-Man run, which just became the most controversial comic in years for killing off Ms. Marvel… just months before her big cinematic debut in The Marvels.
Even before that, Wells’ run on Spider-Man earned widespread criticism from fans due to its shocking (some would say uncharacteristic) character developments and plot twists. Unfortunately, scribes such as Michael Waldron (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) and Jeff Loveness (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) have earned a lot of fan ire of late. Let’s hope Wells escapes that fate, but knowing the public opinion on his comics run some blowback on his Deadpool 3 work seems plausible.
Deadpool 3 is scheduled for release on Nov. 8, 2024.