When it was announced that Donald and Stephen Glover’s Deadpool FX animated series was cancelled, fans were pretty miserable. After all, the scripts leaked by Glover since the project’s collapse sounded pretty damn awesome, though perhaps him saying that Marvel’s only trying to “sell toys to 7-year-old boys and 50-year-old pedophiles” wasn’t a great idea. With that, not to mention Glover’s not particularly veiled accusations of racism as the reason for the show’s cancellation, FX announced that it would not be going ahead due to “creative differences.”
Despite all this, hope may not be entirely lost for the project. After all, the Disney/Fox merger will give Marvel Studios control of Deadpool (as part of the X-Men rights) and creator Rob Liefeld is confident that someone high up’s still rooting for the idea, saying the following in a recent interview:
I will not say who, but a Marvel executive did say: ‘Don’t worry, Robert, we’re going to give you a Deadpool cartoon. It’s still going to happen’. The world of possibilities for Marvel is just enormous. And with them getting the X-Men catalog and the Fantastic 4 catalog and all of the access that grants them, plus the means to do something like a dedicated Deadpool cartoon.
I mean, there’s been a Spider-Man cartoon on since I was 5-years-old, and there’s always been a Spider-Man cartoon. I think there’s an argument to be made that Deadpool is equally as popular to the culture as Spider-Man. So a cartoon would seem inevitable”
I think he’s probably right here. Both Deadpool movies have been R-rated hits due to their adult humor and gory action, and there’s clearly a market for the character. Plus, though it’s looking like Ryan Reynolds may be able to reprise the role in the MCU (or at least continue his own mini-universe on screen in the X-Force movies), the long-term future for the Merc with a Mouth has to be in doubt.
Honestly, it’s in Disney’s best interests to get audiences used to a version of Deadpool that might not be tied to intrinsically to Reynolds’ take on the role (as annoyingly perfect as it might be). So with any luck, things will turn around for the animated series and we’ll get to see it materialize on our screens at some point. As always, watch this space for more.
