As we all know, Deadpool 2 is not just a sequel to the surprise smash hit 2016 movie starring Ryan Reynolds as the Merc with the Mouth. Nope, it also hopes to spin the franchise off into new areas – specifically, it sets up a standalone X-Force film, featuring Wade Wilson’s team of militant mutants.
On the red carpet at the sequel’s premiere this week, Variety caught up with Deadpool 2 screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and quizzed them about how their movie leads into X-Force, which will be written and directed by Drew Goddard. They teased that the end of the film, in particular, holds out the baton for X-Force to take and run with it.
“Well, Drew Goddard’s writing it and will direct it and he has to get off his current movie before he can do so it’s going to be a little while, but we took great pains to try to set it up in this movie at the end, so I think you’ll have some nice combination of those characters you see at the end of this movie forming X-Force.”
If you’ve yet to see the movie or want to go in without spoilers, we recommend you look away now…
You can see what Reese and Wernick mean about how Deadpool 2 sets up X-Force, as the sequel literally closes with the anti-hero and his newfound gang walking off into another movie. The line-up of the team by the end of the runtime consists of Deadpool, Domino, Cable, Colossus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Yukio and Firefist. Team Deadpool aren’t officially called X-Force here, as the group named that actually perish earlier in the movie, but it’s safe to assume that most, if not all, of these characters will return in the spinoff.
That being said, we heard earlier this month that the final line-up that will lead X-Force has yet to be figured out. Reese and Wernick allude to that above, too, as they say that it’ll feature a “nice combination” of Deadpool 2‘s heroes rather than those exact characters. The only ones set in stone right now are Josh Brolin’s Cable and Zazie Beetz’s Domino, but with filming due to begin later this year, details should begin to form over the coming months. Stay tuned.
