It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the villains were arguably the least important part of Fox’s two Deadpool movies. A much heavier focus was placed on the title hero’s irreverent, self-aware, foul-mouthed and fourth wall-breaking antics, so much so that the first installment’s bad guy Ajax was largely reduced to a running joke where Wade Wilson deliberately antagonizes the man who unleashed his latent mutant powers by repeatedly calling him Francis.
You could even make the argument that the sequel didn’t really have much of a villain at all, with duties being assumed at various points throughout the story by Josh Brolin’s Cable, Julian Dennison’s Russell, Eddie Marsan’s head of the Essex Home for Mutant Rehabilitation and the CGI Juggernaut who was brought to life by Ryan Reynolds himself.
There are plenty of comic book movies that suffer from a villain problem, of course, but at least the Deadpool franchise has the benefit of a leading man that’s comfortably among the most charismatic and watchable stars in the business. And now that the Merc with a Mouth’s Marvel Cinematic Universe debut has finally hired writers to kickstart the development process, the rumor mill will soon be heading into overdrive.
A huge leak of reported plot information has made its way online recently and among other things, it claims that T-Ray could end up being one of the film’s villains. A relatively obscure comic book character but a longtime thorn in the titular hero’s side, T-Ray is coincidentally a mercenary capable of breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the audience, while he also operates firmly in the belief that he’s the real Wade Wilson, which sounds like a concept that could be mined for a constant stream of meta references and inside jokes should he end up appearing in Deadpool 3.
