Deadpool has now grossed over $750 million worldwide, and it’s fair to say that neither fans nor 20th Century Fox ever expected numbers like that. The latter were in fact so concerned about the chances of the movie’s success that before it even started shooting, they slashed the budget, which inevitably forced the team working on it to make some changes.
Among the casualties were three villains; Garrison Kane, Sluggo and Wire. The trio are all closely tied into Deadpool’s comic book adventures, but Ajax instead ended up having just the one henchman in the form of Gina Carano’s Angel. Asked in a recent interview why that change was made, director Tim Miller offered the following diplomatic explanation.
“They were Ajax’s sidekicks – they’re all good characters. [Deadpool creator] Rob Liefield is still crying because Garrison Kane’s not in the movie, and Wire had one of the single best jokes in the script ever; his death was pretty epic. But I felt like, honestly – and this is not pandering – I wanted some more women in the movie. And so I wanted to replace them with a female superhero, or supervillain in Gina [Carano]’s case.”
On the surface, that all makes sense, but writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick had a slightly more upfront answer, confirming that the characters were dropped due to budgetary concerns.
“Garrison Kane has a bionic arm for instance, and that was going to be expensive. Wire shoots wires out of his extremities. We had a really cool scene where he was fighting Deadpool and Deadpool was cutting through the wires with his swords, but all expensive and all CG, and when it came time to make the movie we just had to make some hard, hard decisions.”
Reese went on to tease the possibility of Garrison Kane and Wire possibly showing up in the sequel, a movie we already know will include fan-favourite X-Men character Cable. While Deadpool certainly didn’t suffer too much without this lot, it’s a shame to think that we missed out of some potentially awesome action sequences because Fox took $10 million or so from the movie.
Still, Miller and company will no doubt have a much larger budget to play with next time, so hopefully the Deadpool sequel will be able to deliver plenty of epic action.
