One of Ryan Reynolds’ Many Rejected Deadpool 3 Ideas Was an Indie Road Trip

Before Deadpool 3 became Deadpool & Wolverine, we know that there were a lot of ideas rattling around Ryan Reynolds’ head that got shot down. Now we know at least a couple of them, we can start painting a picture of just how varied and wild some of Reynolds’ pitches were.

Speaking as part of an extensive cover story on Deadpool & Wolverine for Entertainment Weekly, Reynolds briefly touched a few of the ideas he tried to pitch for the film while it was still unclear just how many of the toys offered by the Fox acquisition Deadpool was part of would eventually become available to Marvel Studios through layers of legal clearance. One, apparently, was a riff on Rashomon, the legendary Akira Kurosawa movie offering multiple narrative perspectives, each with their own biases and subjective recollections, of the murder of a Samurai (it’s in the waters at Disney right now, it seems). Another, however, went in a completely different direction from what you’d expect out of a third Deadpool film: a buddy road trip film between Wade and Karan Soni’s affable taxi driver, Dopinder.

“Literally, it was a $US5 or $US6 million budget with no special effects,” Reynolds recalled to Entertainment Weekly. “It was just a talkie-talkie road trip with me and Dopinder and some of the things we collected and saw along the way. It wasn’t meant to be an event movie. If we’re on our way to Point C, it was meant to just get us to Point B. That was the weirdest one. I liked it. I thought it was kind of fun.”

The idea of a Deadpool film that’s more like an esoteric travel feature being the first Marvel Studios-owned project with the character might have bristled a lot of people’s feathers, but it’s interesting that Reynolds at least thought it could be on the table as an option—one to do while the larger legal machinations that fell out of the Disney-Fox merger settled into place. We’ll never know, of course, especially in an age where Marvel is looking at its output at large and pulling away from the more esoteric in search of surefire hits—which Deadpool & Wolverine is seemingly shaping up to be, if early sales indications are anything to go by. Maybe a Deadpool/Logan team up making a hojillion dollars at the box office will afford Reynolds the chance to revisit some of his more out-there ideas down the line.

Deadpool & Wolverine opens July 26.

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