Deadpool 3 appears to have taken a substantive step toward becoming a reality, thanks to the selection of a director. For star Ryan Reynolds, the long-awaited threequel could represent a smooth collaborative transition, seeing as it will prospectively have Shawn Levy, who directed him in the recent action-comedy, Free Guy, in the big chair for the long-awaited threequel.
Should reported negotiations prove successful, then Levy would join Deadpool 3 to work off a script by the returning duo of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, according to THR. The prospective partnership of fellow Canadians would fit a pattern, seeing as Levy’s work on 2021’s limited-theatrical-release feature, Free Guy, was quickly followed up with another Reynolds vehicle, Netflix sci-fi comedy film The Adam Project, which just hit the streamer on March 11.
The film franchise’s launch with 2016’s Deadpool was essentially a mulligan for Reynolds’s role as Wade Wilson, a.k.a. wisecracking mutant mercenary Deadpool, after he played a different version of him in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. However, the movie not only overcame the earlier, widely derided role, but rose to become the surprise story of the industry, manifesting as an experimental R-rated comic book movie that—despite being demographically limited by its lewd, crude, non-family-friendly nature—achieved a lucrative performance of $782.8 million at the global box office. While 2018 follow-up Deadpool 2 only slightly outperformed its predecessor with $785.8 million, it proved that the formula was no flash in the pan, and seemed to be a raucous watershed for the genre in general.
However, the Deadpool movies happen to be offshoots of Marvel property-licensee Twentieth Century Fox’s long-running X-Men film franchise; a continuity that would face abrupt abandonment upon the studio’s 2019 merger into the Disney monolith, which had been redefining industry success for over a decade with subsidiary Marvel Studios’ Avengers-centric canon of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. While Bob Iger (Disney’s CEO at the time,) confirmed that Reynolds’s ongoing role as Deadpool would be grandfathered into the MCU, and even expressed an intent to maintain the franchise’s R-rated approach (despite being under the family-friendly Disney corporate umbrella), Deadpool would nevertheless find himself put on ice. The deliberative approach seemed necessary since the future of the MCU did not seem clear after achieving ultimate success in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame’s record-breaking $2.79 billion worldwide gross. Thusly, what followed was a new, multi-medium approach, mixing MCU movies with well-produced, star-studded streaming serials on Disney+; an approach that became logistically essential after the pandemic changed the box office equation.
Consequently, with Deadpool 3, Shawn Levy would take the reigns of a bellwether franchise, which not only revitalized Reynolds’s career but will presumably serve as an introductory linchpin for the arrival of characters from the X-Men side of Marvel Comics into the acknowledged canon of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet, it’s a directorial proprietorship that would, in retrospect, fulfill apparent destiny, seeing as Levy’s work on the Reynolds-headlined Free Guy was promoted with a July 2021 video (as seen just above,) in which the star dons his crimson Deadpool getup to share a couch with Taika Waititi’s imminently returning Thor: Ragnarok character, Korg, to riff on the film for a YouTuber-style reaction video to the trailer. Thus, the bridge between the MCU and Fox’s X-Men mythos has, technically, already been constructed because of Levy. Nevertheless, helming the first Disney-era Deadpool movie will come with a unique set of perils.
Deadpool 3 doesn’t even have a release window at this point, much less a set date. However, the directorial appointment seems promising for the film’s arrival, prospectively within the next two years.
