While the longterm future of Fox’s X-Universe should theoretically be in doubt given the impending Disney buyout, it seems like future X-Men projects are still moving ahead full steam at the studio. And with Deadpool 2 out today, receiving great reviews and set to clean up at the box office, who can blame them? It’s been a stratospheric rise for the irreverent superhero, having gone from cult comic book hero to the mainstream in just a couple of years.
Beyond Deadpool 2, though, fans and creatives are also looking forward to X-Force, which will essentially be a spinoff tied to the Wade Wilson end of the X-Universe and will probably also feature lower tier and more bizarre characters from the 80s and 90s. It’s sounding fun as hell, and the writers of Deadpool 2 are eager to keep their winning streak going.
In an interview with CBR, Rhett Reese was asked if X-Force would be R-rated and in the same vein as the two Deadpool movies, to which he replied:
“I think the fun part of X-Force is they’re much more morally flexible than the X-Men. They can get their hands dirty a little bit. There’s more grey area. It’ll be raunchier, it’ll be rated R, I’m sure. We’ll get to see an ensemble movie that’s pushed, hopefully, as far as the Deadpool individual movie was pushed.”
He’s absolutely right that the X-Force team deserve an R-rating to do them justice. While the X-Men were created by the pacifist Charles Xavier with the notion of fostering positive mutant/human relations (albeit with a dude that has knives sticking out of his hands), the X-Force are a paramilitary organization intended for brutal, shoot-on-sight missions that the cuddly X-Men could never countenance.
Exactly who will be on this team remains in question though, and when Reese was asked that, he explained:
“I mean Drew Goddard’s writing X-Force and he’s not going to start writing it until the fall. And so we gave him certainly a spring-board to jump off of but ultimately it’s going to be up to Drew as to exactly which characters he wants to keep. I think it will certainly be some combination of the characters we’ve presented for him, but we’re not going to try to hem them in. I think he might add new ones, he might use specific ones that are a little non-obvious from the ones he’s already got to choose from. So we’ll just have to see.”
One thing’s for certain, even if Disney achieve their long held ambition of attaining the movie rights to the entire Marvel universe, they’d be fools not to let this teeny, eccentric corner of the X-Universe continue to blossom in theaters. After all, even if they did decide to fold Deadpool into the MCU, the character’s fourth wall breaking antics should mean they can slot Ryan Reynolds right in alongside the existing heroes with ease.
