Deadpool & Wolverine Could Have Featured Robert Downey Jr. And All The Avengers

Deadpool & Wolverine has a lot of cameos, but the writers were not able to get every actor they wanted to come in to play a small role in the big film. Actor Robert Downey Jr. was originally eyed to come back to play Tony Stark/Iron Man in the film, while a grander idea was to bring in the entire Avengers squad, but it ultimately didn’t work out. Spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine follow below.

Writer Paul Wernick told IndieWire that the team wrote a scene featuring Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan and Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. Co-writer Rhett Reese said Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds read the scene with Favreau and Downey Jr., but little did they know that Downey Jr. was preparing to return to the MCU as a totally different character, Doctor Doom, for the movie Avengers: Doomsday.

Wernick said the Deadpool & Wolverine team didn’t know about Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom role when they were coming up with ideas for how to bring the actor into the Deadpool film.

“There’s no way he was going to do both,” Wernick said. “And then we said, ‘Oh, Downey doesn’t say ‘no’ to Ryan Reynolds, does he? No one says no to Ryan Reynolds.’ And Ryan gave him the hard press. We wrote scenes, and Downey read the scenes, but what we didn’t know behind the scenes was this Doctor Doom thing.”

Reese confirmed that the plan was for Tony Stark to reject Deadpool, similar to how the scene plays out in the finished film with Happy. The main difference was that Tony Stark and Happy would have been in this scene together.

“We would’ve loved to have Downey. But, at the same time, I think Marvel had this ace in their hole, which is he’s about to come back in this different character,” Reese said. “So, to have him be Tony Stark? Knowing that Doctor Doom was coming on the heels of that? It just didn’t make sense.”

Wernick went on to reveal that there was a version of this particular scene early in the filmmaking process that had “all the Avengers in the room.”

“And Wade was rejected and then he dressed all the Avengers down in a way only Deadpool could do,” Wernick said, with Reese adding that Deadpool was supposed to “get mad and basically attack each one of them in a vicious kind of way.”

Reese said this was an overly ambitious idea, saying it “would’ve been impossible” to get all the Avengers actors together in one place to film the scene, not to mention what it might cost.

Deadpool & Wolverine is crushing it at the box office currently, exceeding $900 million so far.