Earlier this month, a report came out alleging that the planned X-Force movie will not be happening under Fox, raising the question of whether the Deadpool spinoff flick might ultimately be one of the many X-Men-related projects that get lost in the transition to Disney.
In the wake of this rumor, even Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld responded with a tweet commiserating the death of X-Force, calling it a “victim of the merger.” But in a recent interview with ComicBook.com, the writer admitted that he doesn’t particularly know the fate of this superhero team, while explaining how the typically R-rated nature of Deadpool and X-Force create a tricky situation for the famously family-friendly Disney.
“I believe Deadpool and X-Force are a conundrum for the merger. I do,” Liefeld said. “X-Force and Deadpool are a conundrum, and how they will be solved, I guess, is to be determined. TBD.”
Though the Merc with a Mouth has already been given the PG-13 treatment with the recent Once Upon a Deadpool, the mixed reception to this Deadpool 2 re-release suggests that it may not be in Disney’s best interest to try to make Wade Wilson into a family-friendly hero. And while Liefeld is a verified fan of Once Upon a Deadpool, he also argues that the extra freedom allowed by the R-rating can prove genuinely beneficial to certain properties.
“I feel like making what was R into PG-13, Once Upon a Deadpool aside, when I hear PG-13, I hear ‘Conform, conform, conform. Can we have successful Deadpool and X-Force that they can conform?’” Liefeld said. “And I would question that. I would like to see again, I believe, there’s a lot of life left in the R rating.
“I’ll go to Logan, two Deadpool movies, the John Wick movies. Can you make a John Wick movie that I like without an R rating? See, I can answer this better if I take another franchise. Would I like Logan better if it wasn’t an R rating? No, I would not. That movie, finally, I got to see the Wolverine I grew up loving. And surprise, what’s everybody’s favorite Wolverine movie? It’s Logan. No one hesitates.”
The future of Wolverine under Marvel Studios is a whole other line of speculation in itself, but for Deadpool, one of the biggest questions is whether Disney would be willing to compromise its image in order to give the fans what they want. How the studio resolves this conundrum is still up in the air, but if that recent rumor of an R-rated Black Widow movie ever amounts to anything, then perhaps the X-Force movie isn’t as dead as many fear.