Ryan Reynolds’ take on Deadpool has always been brazenly meta, but “Deadpool 2” came close to pushing the envelope. Apart from a detour that would have featured the cast of “Night Court” (the original ’80s sitcom, not its revival), screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick had also toyed with the idea of a Fantastic Four crossover.
A brief sequence in “Deadpool 2” is dedicated to the formation (and near-immediate demise) of X-Force, a mutant strike team with loose ties to the X-Men. Reynolds’ Wade Wilson interviews a handful of prospects in a brief, yet hilarious montage. But when “Deadpool 2” was in its early development stages with original director Tim Miller, Reese and Wernick considered extending the joke with a few familiar faces.
“We had Chris Evans coming in, not as Captain America, but as the Human Torch,” Wernick said in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment. The sequence would have seen Evans reprising his role as Johnny Storm after over a decade — and it wouldn’t have stopped there. “We had a subsequent scene where all the [2015] ‘Fantastic Four’ [cast] came in together, including Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch, to kind of one-up the Chris Evans visit,” Wernick added.
Miller also had plans for a big third act moment that featured Jamie Bell’s version of the Thing more prominently. Concept artist Alexander Lozano had been tasked with designing a more comic-accurate look for the Thing. He’d even placed the First Family in more recognizable blue suits – a far cry from the muddy grey space suits they’d worn in Josh Trank’s 2015 film.
