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For all the incredible guest stars and forgotten characters whom Ryan Reynolds roped into the making of Deadpool & Wolverine, there are still a small handful of big gets who got away — maybe they saw what he did to Brad Pitt in the last movie.
Six years after Deadpool 2 proved that Reynolds’ decade-long struggle to get Hollywood to buy into his darkly hilarious, R-rated super-antihero film franchise wasn’t just a flash in the pan, the multi-hyphenate mogul pulled out all the stops to turn this year’s Deadpool & Wolverine into one big send-up of the chaotic comic book movie industry that exists outside of the mainstream Marvel Cinematic Universe. After all, Reynolds is far from the first A-lister to attempt to bring a less-loved comic book character to life on the big screen, and he graciously decided to turn his smashing success at the ambitious undertaking to honor (or mock) the other actors who went before him, whether they were Channing Tatum as Gambit, Chris Evans as Johnny Storm or Ryan Reynolds as The Green Lantern.
Deadpool & Wolverine was the peak of Reynolds’ fourth-wall-breaking parody/pastiche of the superhero genre, and the list of celebrity guests who reprised their forgotten and maligned superhero roles was a who’s-who of top talent. But it was sadly missing two major names. During a talk with Entertainment Weekly’s Awardist podcast, Reynolds revealed that he tried to convince Ben Affleck and Nicholas Cage to return to the roles Daredevil and Ghost Rider respectively for Deadpool & Wolverine.
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“They were in early drafts,” Reynolds said of Affleck and Cage, who had brief run-ins with the pre-MCU Marvel movie machine in the 2000s. “We had versions of that, but then, as it shook out, you’re sort of looking – we’re trying to make the movie responsibly, as well. It’s a big budget.”
While Reynolds enjoyed the massive $200 million investment in Deadpool & Wolverine, he didn’t feel that landing even more big names for small parts was financially or creatively responsible. “It’s the biggest budget of any of the Deadpool movies, but you want to give yourself as much constraint, which really I think facilitates asymmetrical thinking and creativity. If you have too much time or too much money, it usually murders that kind of creativity. So, yeah, you’re shrinking things.”
Cage isn’t exactly known for being hard to book or demanding too high a salary, but Reynolds says that his efforts to court the man who played the titular satanic motorcyclist in the 2007 Ghost Rider film and its 2011 sequel Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance sadly failed. “We did talk to Nic Cage,” Reynolds explained. “We tried to get him, but he was a no-go. … I would’ve loved him.”
Affleck, on the other hand, had even less reason to return to the role of the blind martial artist and vigilante after starring in 2003’s Daredevil across from his now-ex-wife Jennifer Garner, who played his similarly skilled love interest Elektra. After all, Garner was already booked for a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, and Affleck’s complicated relationships with his ex-loves are already over-discussed topics in entertainment media.
Despite the absences of the aughts’ most quickly-forgotten superheroes, the list of superstars who did decide to mock their past work in Deadpool & Wolverine is still impressive, and it may pave the way for more past stars to join the Deadpool Cinematic Universe in the future. After all, is Tom Hardy really a better venom than Topher Grace?