Part and parcel of Deadpool‘s immediate appeal was the way in which Ryan Reynold’s Merc With a Mouth, in remaining true to his comic book origins, broke through the fourth wall with reckless abandon, and that proved to be a running thread through the entirety of Tim Miller’s R-rated feature.
Setting out its stall from the get-go, the opening credits proved to be as much a parody of other opening sequences as it was a good-natured jib at the cast and crew involved, even poking fun at the director as an “overpaid tool.”
As the camera looped around the three-dimensional freeze frame, there was also a nod to the film’s writers –Â Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick – as “the real heroes,” and the pair recently weighed in on that label in an interview with Creative Screenwriting.
Flippant though it may be, Reese and Wernick revealed that there is a shard of truth to the description, which was essentially designed to subvert the filmmaking hierarchy.
“We came up with that actually. We just figured that it was a fun nod to the heartache as we’ve had on this thing over the last six and a half years. Screenwriters aren’t at the top of the food chain in the feature world. They often should be, but sometimes they take second billing. It was a fun, fun way for us to poke fun at the hierarchy. We had heroic moments for sure on this movie.”
Speaking in a separate piece with io9, Reese and Wernick went on to discuss Deadpool‘s abrupt $7 million budget cut.
“We had to carve something like $7-8 million out of the budget in a 48-hour window. And we, as a group, just put our heads together, got creative, and said ‘How do we cut what is essentially nine pages out of a 110 page script?”
Deadpool is out now in theaters. If you’ve already had you fix of the Merc With a Mouth, why not have a glance at our favorite moments from the film?
